| page 3 4. Research Articles. This category is for those publications that publish what might be described as “academic literature” or “research literature” – articles that generally result from research-based and reviewed and critiqued work, intended to discover new knowledge. Hundreds of publications exist, worldwide, that publish research articles on accounting, finance, management, business, and economics topics – all topic areas of potential interest to management accountants. The best way I have found to gain quick Internet access to articles of interest in these hundreds of publications is to use Ingenta at www.ingenta.com. Ingenta has arrangements with most, but not all, publishers of accounting, finance, management, business, and economic journals publishing research articles. At Ingenta’s home page, clicking “advanced search” leads to a good search menu to find articles using your search terms. Ingenta searches about 650 journals in the economics and business area, published by about 25 publishers. The titles, authors, and journals containing your search terms in the title, abstract, or keywords associated with the article are shown. You can click on the title to see the article's abstract (summary). You also have the option to purchase access to the full text for most articles using the pay to view system. Prices charged by the publishers to view full articles generally range from $10 to $30, depending on the publisher. Also, Ingenta adds a fee for its service. (At the websites of most of the larger publishers, you can also search for and pay to view articles published in the publisher’s journals, paying the same fee you pay at Ingenta, but without the extra Ingenta service fee.) A list of the approximately 650 journals, which Ingenta has access to in the economics and business area, can be seen by clicking “browse by publication” at Ingenta’s homepage, and then “by subject area”, and then “Economics and business”. Publishers that Ingenta has arrangements with for gaining search access to their economics and business journals include: Academic Press Blackwell Elsevier (Science Direct) Emerald (MCB University Press) Guilford Publications Henry Stewart Publications Industrial Relation Services IOS Press John Benjamin Publishing Kluwer Lawrence Erlbaum Associates M.E. Sharpe, Inc. MIT Press Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development Oxford University Press Palgrave MacMillan Plenum Sage Springer Taylor & Francis University of California Press University of Wisconsin Press Wiley InterScience World Scientific Because Ingenta searches such a large database, search strategies used can make a large difference in the numbers of hits returned. The obvious strategy should be to return all the relevant articles in the database, limiting the irrelevant articles to as close to zero as you can. Searching Ingenta on “activity and costs” returned 1,057 articles. Ingenta searches all of the journals in its database, not just the economics and business journals. Therefore, in searching Ingenta, trying different search terms may be helpful. Searching on “activity-based costing” yielded 154 hits. Another point about search sites is that some of them can be very sensitive to various factors. For example, searching Ingenta on "activity base costing”, without the dash after activity, only returned 44 hits. Most of the articles from both the Ingenta “activity-based costing” and the “activity based costing” searches are likely to be of interest to the management accountant, whereas most of the “activity costs” hits are likely not to be interest. Another good way of accessing research article abstracts in economics and business journals on the Internet is at the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) site www.ssrn.com. SSRN has access to hundreds of journals published by many of the large publishers covered by Ingenta, but also has access to economics and business journals published by these publishers and associations not covered by Ingenta: American Accounting Association American Economics Association Cambridge University Press Canadian Academic Accounting Association Springer Also, SSRN accesses many university and non-profit publication and working paper databases. At the SSRN homepage, clicking on “Search and Download Papers” takes you to the advance search menu. Abstracts are available for articles and papers found in your search. In some cases, for example for working papers, articles can be downloaded without charge. A pay to view full articles system does not appear to exist at SSRN. Options for paying to view the full article, if needed, could be to go to Ingenta or the publisher’s website (if they have pay to view systems). One advantage of SSRN is that its database of articles is limited to disciplines such as economics, business, and law. However, the Ingenta database covers most all academic disciplines. Therefore, searching in SSRN is less sensitive for getting non-relevant results. Searching on “activity and costs” at SSRN returned 308 hits (versus 1,057 at Ingenta), most of which are likely to be of interest to management accountants. One interesting article returned has to do with the association between the use of activity based costing in companies and an improved financial performance. The article shows that there is an association, based on the data studied and presented. click here to go to the next page |
| Finding Accounting and Business Articles On the Internet |