it safe’ and make only marginal contributions to existing
research, rather than seeking to undertake research which
fundamentally questions existing thinking and develops
new knowledge in the area. We will return to this issue
later; in the meantime we will summarise the papers which
have been published in Management Accounting Research
over the past two decades.
As seen in Tables 1 and 2, there were 178 published
papers in the first decade and 205 in the second. However,
the total number of papers in the second decade
(205) includes the editorials by the guest editors of special
issues/sections. As many of these editorials make a
significant contribution to the literature, as well as introducing
the contents of the special issue/section, they have
been included in the number of papers when analysing
the regions of origin and the topics studied. However, it
was not appropriate to include them in the analysis of
the research settings, theory used and research methods
in Tables 3–5 where, consequently, the total number of
papers for the second decade is 196. The slight increase
in the number of papers is because the early volumes,
1990–1995, included abstracts of papers on management
accounting published elsewhere. Apart from this factor, the
size of Management Accounting Research and the number of
papers in each volume has remained relatively constant
over the two decades. However, readers may have noticed
that there have been changes in the numbers of pages in
individual volumes from time to time. This has been due
to the changes which the publishers have made to the format
of the journal. By and large, the numbers of papers