Accounting Journal Rankings, Authorship Patterns and the Author Affiliation Index Kam C. Chan, Jamie Y. Tong & Frank F. Zhang J ournal rankings are controversial but they are nonetheless important benchmarks for making various important decisions. As discussed in the extant literature, they impact the well being of many constituents. A few examples include: (1) faculty members deciding where to submit their research based on the perceived quality of journals; (2) faculty members seeking promotion, tenure, merit pay raises, job opportunities, consulting work and grant applications based on the perceived quality of their published work; and (3) schools using the quality of journals to promote their research achievements and thus attract external funding, new students, staff and faculty members. Therefore, ‘good’ journals provide incentives for faculty members and schools to conduct quality research while ‘bad’ journals can misguide effort and perhaps lead to resource misallocation. Journal ranking studies in accounting and other disciplines mainly adopt survey-based and citation- based approaches. Recently however, several studies have used a new and promising approach called the author affiliation index (AAI) to evaluate operations management, economics and finance journals. No study has yet applied such a method to accounting journals. The objective of this paper therefore is to use the AAI method to rank accounting journals. Further, we also relate a journal’s AAI to journal co-authorship patterns. A journal’s AAI is defined as the percentage of the journal’s articles authored by scholars from a predetermined set of top programs. For instance, if Journal X has an AAI of 80% using a set of top 100 programs, this means that 80% of Journal X’s articles are authored by scholars from the top 100 programs. The logic of AAI is that a good journal will tend to attract scholars from top programs to submit and publish their research in the journal. Therefore, a higher (lower) AAI for a journal represents a higher (lower) journal quality because leading scholars generally produce quality research. Chen and Huang (2007), in a finance journal ranking exercise, conclude that ‘On the whole, our AAI-based journal ranking is highly correlated with the findings in prior studies. Therefore, when properly constructed, AAIs conveniently offer a credible way We conduct an evaluation of 43 accounting journals using the author affiliation index (AAI). Our results suggest that the Australian Business Dean’s Council (ABDC) ratings are consistent with the AAI-based rankings. Nonetheless, there are a few highly (lowly) regarded accounting journals in terms of AAI receiving a relatively lower (higher) rating in the ABDC journal ranking list. The co-authorship patterns suggest that top AAI and near-top AAI journals actually see more co-authorship from scholars in top programs and scholars in other programs (both ranked 21–100 and ‘others’). Correspondence Frank Zhang, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia. Tel: +618 6488 1821; fax: +618 6488 1047; email: frank.zhang@uwa.edu.au doi: 10.1111/j.1835-2561.2012.00193.x Australian Accounting Review No. 63 Vol. 22 Issue 4 2012 407