The research assessment exercise 2001- insights and implications for accounting education research in the UK

Following the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), details from the submissions of each institution were made available to the public for the first time via the Internet, thus facilitating a greater degree of scrutiny of the results than had hitherto been the case. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature on the publishing patterns of UK academics by examining the accounting education submissions to the RAE 2001. The paper begins by discussing the RAE process in the UK and the findings of prior literature on publication patterns within accounting research in the UK in order to contextualise the examination of the RAE submissions in accounting education. In particular, the dominance of refereed journals over other publication outlets, the increasing prevalence of co-authorship and the characteristics of publishing academics are examined. The paper then reports on the methods used to analyse accounting education research submitted to the RAE 2001 and discusses the main findings. The implications of these findings are discussed in the concluding section.