Template for Archival Accounting Research

Although local journals publishing accounting articles mainly based on thesis template, it is considerably different than whatever published by the international journals. Such matter resulted in a significant confusion for accounting researchers and students in studying, developing and reviewing local and international articles. Moreover, such situation leads to desk rejection of papers submitted from Iran to top international accounting journals. In recent years, due to considerable increase in the number of accounting students in higher education level, publishing some books in relation to research in accounting and critical papers in this area, there is a significant demand to overcome such inconsistency. Hence, this study presents a template for an archival accounting research, for local researchers and journals, in light with the template of accounting papers published in top international journals. As a result, a paper published in a top accounting journal was translated and then its template (components of each section) was analysed. Furthermore, some important points as well as unnecessary items were highlighted. The present study highlights that an archival accounting paper contains: title, abstract, introduction (covering: research issue, motivation, objective, how do you do it? and contribution), background and hypothesis development (theoretical background, literature review and hypothesis), research method (data collection and model specification), results (descriptive statistics, main finding and robustness tests), conclusion and remarks and references.