Financial Accounting Standards Research Initiative

Very interesting issue Rob. On one hand, I find myself agreeing with a number of the points in the article. For example, “In the real world, few works of scholarship are written purely for truth-seeking purposes.” Most academics enter a project with an idea of the answer the data will provide. In some cases where the researcher has a string of studies that support conclusion X, the researcher will not start a project that is likely to find something opposite of X. More commonly, newly minted researchers just want to find a significant relation because of fear that lack of significance will preclude publication and therefore hinder their tenurability. The point is, I find fewer and fewer researchers who profess to be looking for truth, regardless of what the truth happens to be. Thus, professing that papers produced under “bad” motives should be disregarded would entail devaluing most all of the recent accounting research.

On the other hand, because of the biases mentioned in the prior paragraph, I think the review process should carefully scrutinize claims in submissions. To the extent biased conclusions are detected (either via misinterpretation of the results, drawing inferences beyond those that the data can support, or disregarding reasonable alternative explanations), the reviewer and editor should point this out to the author and request revision. Otherwise, as suggested by the law professor, readers without the expertise in the field will take the results at face value without understanding the bias.

Perhaps then the issue is should a positive relation exist between the intensity of scrutiny in the review process and the inferred motives of the authors? I would expect a modestly positive relation. The lack of inferred motives would not negate the need for scrutiny. But a highly level of motives should increase the reviewer’s inherent skepticism.