Accounting scholarship is an academic discipline oriented towards the profession of accounting, usually taught at a business school. Since accounting is a highly technical, standards oriented profession, both practitioners and academics may claim to be experts. Accounting directly impacts many other specialties in business and is closely linked with finance. The theoretical underpinnings of both accounting and finance are derived from economics. Accounting academia Requirements for an appointment as a professor vary considerably worldwide. Once appointed as a professor, the next step is being awarded tenure. At most institutions, this step is very competitive. Many institutions value academic credentials, professional certifications, and real world experience. Accounting has generally been oriented towards practical knowledge as opposed to theoretical abstractions. Most students are entering the field for immediate practical knowledge. Adult learner/executive students often expect professors to have practical experience as an accountant or in commercial organizations. These students expect practical examples and an MBA case study approach to their education. By contrast, PhD students prefer research professors who themselves earned a PhD in accounting. Types of research There are two broad types of accounting research: Positive accounting Normative accounting Areas of research Accounting scholarship deals with the following areas: Accounting Auditing Taxation Financial management Professional ethics Corporate governance Controllership Entrepreneurship Experimental economics Agency theory Accounting research can be tailored to a specific industry or knowledge-based, such as accounting for law firms or hotels as well as accounting for quality. Accounting Scholarship Rankings The ability of researchers and institutions to produce quality accounting research is an important factor in many decisions made in the academic community. Such decisions may include, which program a perspective Ph.D. student should attend, where a professor should teach, and whom to collaborate with on a project. As such, many studies have been performed to rank accounting institutions and individual faculty members based on their research performance in order to provide decision makers with useful information. Empirical studies have documented that leading accounting journals publish in total fewer research articles than comparable journals in economics and other business disciplines, and consequently, accounting scholars are relatively less successful in academic publishing than their business school peers. Due to different publication rates between accounting and other business disciplines, a recent study based on academic author rankings concludes that the competitive value of a single publication in a top-ranked journal is highest in accounting and lowest in marketing. Difference from scholarship