Accounting and finance is a discipline built on one foundational principle: that responsibility must be clearly attributed. It is therefore striking that papers in our leading journals increasingly draw my attention not for their findings but for their lists of five, six or more authors, with no account offered of what any individual distinctively brought to the work.

Authorship inflation is not a new phenomenon but its recent acceleration has been dramatic. , the official journal of the , offers a telling illustration. In 1995, it published 14 papers, 10 (71 per cent) of which were sole authored. In 2025, it published 81 papers, but just three (4 per cent) were sole authored.

Over that period, the average number of authors per paper rose from 1.36 to 3.17. And of the 23 papers with five or more authors published in the journal’s history up to 2025, 20 appeared in the 2020s, and 11 in 2024 and 2025 alone. The first three issues of 2026 have already carried a further 10 such papers.

and the , the discipline’s most selective outlets in accounting and finance respectively, have also seen sole-authored papers fall from 34 per cent and 28 per cent in 1995 to, respectively, 2 per cent and 12 per cent in 2025.

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Authorship inflation is international, and Ed deHaan, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, recently identified the incentive precisely : when publications are counted in performance evaluations without adjustment for the number of contributors, adding names becomes the rational move.

But in the UK, where I spent more than a decade before moving to Ireland, that incentive does not merely exist but has been institutionalised via the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in a way that is distinctive among major research-intensive systems. That is why it is not coincidental, I believe, that of those 23 multi-authored pre-2025 papers in British Accounting Review,��14 included UK-affiliated authors, nine as corresponding author. The journal draws submissions internationally.

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For a standard empirical paper in accounting and finance, the intellectual labour divides naturally into a small number of roles: theoretical framing, empirical execution and the craft of writing. Beyond four authors, then, the question of what each additional contributor distinctively brought to the work becomes increasingly difficult to answer and impossible to verify.

That is particularly the case because, unlike in the biosciences, author order in accounting and finance traditionally follows alphabetical convention, rather than signalling relative contribution or seniority, especially in the top journals.

The argument that larger author teams reflect deeper collaboration is not without merit in disciplines where research genuinely requires it, such as laboratory sciences and multi-site clinical trials. Accounting and finance is not such a discipline, however. If anything, advances in computational tools and research infrastructure have reduced rather than increased the need for large teams. If proofreading or collecting data now counts as authorship, the bar has in effect disappeared.

Even publishers have noticed the problem. now requires formal disclosure of author contributions – an acknowledgement that the implicit assumption of equal contribution can no longer be sustained. Those disclosures are self-reported and unverifiable, however, and it remains the case in the UK that adding a colleague’s name to your paper, with the implicit or explicit expectation of reciprocation, costs nothing but gains a great deal.

Hence, the coherent research identity that once distinguished a serious scholar – a recognisable body of work, deepening over time around two or three connected themes – is giving way to a long, varied and intellectually scattered list of publications assembled for evaluation purposes.

As well as the REF’s failure to distinguish between a sole-authored paper and a six-authored paper, UK universities’ increasing dependence on international fees is also a factor here. Accounting and finance programmes are and attract disproportionately large international cohorts, drawn by the discipline’s proximity to professional qualifications and financial careers. As resources now follow students rather than scholarship, appointment and promotion criteria have shifted accordingly, with research evaluation becoming a tick-box exercise, with outputs counted rather than read.

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In short, accounting and finance education in UK business schools risks becoming indistinguishable from the professional training offered by commercial providers: technically competent, intellectually thin, and entirely disconnected from the research frontier of the discipline.

The consequences for journal selection have been particularly revealing. The top accounting and finance journals are dominated by scholars in the US, where appointments and promotions rely more heavily on peer review than on metrics. The rational response for UK scholars has been to target outlets in adjacent fields. A top-ranked journal in tourism or hospitality is not equivalent to a top-ranked journal in core accounting and finance, but promotion panels without subject expertise are poorly placed to make that distinction.

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The same institutional logic has reshaped doctoral supervision. In the US, only those candidates capable of producing genuinely original scholarship are admitted. UK business schools routinely admit self-funding doctoral students, creating both a revenue stream and, in some cases, an informal pipeline of research assistance and, ultimately, publications; the doctoral thesis becomes the working paper, and the working paper becomes the journal submission. My own practice is to insist on doctoral students taking first authorship on work emerging from their theses but not everyone agrees – and the reaction is instructive.

The – now legally binding on all German universities – shows the way forward. Under this, authorship must reflect genuine intellectual contribution. Supervisory functions, dataset provision and proofreading explicitly do not qualify. And honorary authorship is formally prohibited.

Such rules should be adopted by the REF. Co-authors must agree and disclose their individual percentage contributions before submission – a mechanism that is both simple and genuinely verifiable. And REF output counts should be weighted by individual contribution. This would shift the incentive calculus immediately, making a sole-authored work worth much more than a multi-authored one.

The question is whether those responsible for the REF are willing to make that change, or whether the current arrangement has generated sufficient institutional interest in its own continuation to resist reform. One cannot easily wake those who have decided it is more comfortable to remain asleep.

But the view from outside the UK system is clarifying. What from the inside looks like normal institutional life, from the outside looks like a discipline quietly losing confidence in its own purpose.

Accounting and finance exist to equip financial institutions and regulatory bodies with the analytical tools to scrutinise risk and regulate markets effectively. But how can we teach students the importance of accurate financial reporting, or the ethical obligations of audit, while simultaneously building publication records that systematically misrepresent our individual intellectual contributions?

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is an academic at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. He has served on the editorial board of The British Accounting Review since 2019. He writes here in a personal capacity.