Acknowledgments Networks in Accounting Scholarship: A Note

Abstract We explore social networks in accounting research. Our sample spans the 1996–2015 period and includes all research articles that were published in the Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Accounting Organizations and Society, Review of Accounting Studies, and Contemporary Accounting Research. Employing social network analysis, we delineate and discuss the structure of scientific collaboration as it appears in the acknowledgments of published research articles. We identify the most central nodes in this nexus of intellectual partnership. Furthermore, we discover that acknowledgments constitute a small-world social network, with high average clustering coefficient and small average distance within a giant component which covers the biggest part of the acknowledgment network.