With the Australian Business Deans Council set to consider a revised ranking of journal quality a new analysis of finance research suggest that top rating ones are not always interesting.

Chris Brooks and Lisa Schopohl from the Henley Business School  dug into data relating to 30 000 published papers to find a, “striking lack of diversity in the topics investigated and the methodological approaches used.”

And it will be more of the same old, same old, while the publishing pecking order remains. “Rather than aiming to emulate the leading schools publishing in the leading journals, researchers should develop their own independent agendas, potentially addressing different questions, using a plurality of approaches and citing relevant and high quality work wherever it is published. This would make it possible to break out of the vicious cycle where only top journal publications are perceived to be of value in the finance area so that researchers worldwide only aim to publish there,” Brooks and Schopohl write.

Australian “and Oceana” researchers do not appear often in “journals of distinction” accounting(sorry) for 1.66 per cent of finance articles, 3.58 per cent of accounting, and1.23 per cent in economics. In two-star journals however the accountants made nearly 22 per cent of articles.