As part of the general policy to increase international competitiveness of (accounting) research from the Germanspeaking
area, doctoral education has been identified as a key mechanism. Fiedler, Welpe, and Picot’s (2006) survey, for
example, revealed that young German business researchers regarded their (traditional) PhD education as being of little help
for submitting papers to leading international journals. Those doctoral students who attended a structured course
programme, however, felt significantly better prepared for the review processes of international journals. In the following
we focus on these two aspects which we regard as being the two most salient institutional changes that have taken place in
PhD education during recent years – namely, the introduction of a structured doctoral education model and a focus on
publication, or at least on the desire to publish, in highly ranked international journals.7