Accounting Research Editing and Proofreading Services

A paper about earnings management can be a finance paper or an accounting paper, and the difference is not the data. It is whether the argument turns on something about accounting — a standard, a disclosure requirement, a measurement choice, the discretion a rule permits — or whether accounting is simply where the numbers came from. Reviewers in this field reject the second kind constantly, and usually with the same comment.

We edit what accounting researchers write — journal articles and their contribution sections, archival and market-based study reports, standard-setting and regulatory analysis, audit and assurance research, management accounting case and field studies, tax research and its institutional framing, conference and workshop papers, discussion papers and responses, doctoral chapters and job market papers, and comment letters to standard setters. Our editors work on the paragraph that makes a paper an accounting paper.

The accounting contribution paragraph is where a paper is placed or misplaced, and its failure is a contribution to a general literature. A finding that earnings quality predicts something is interesting to several fields and belongs to whichever one can explain the mechanism through its own institutions. We work through these so the contribution is stated in terms of an accounting construct — the standard, the recognition threshold, the disclosure regime, the discretion the rule creates — since this is the test a referee applies in the first paragraph; so the institutional detail that makes the setting informative is given rather than assumed, because a paper relying on a jurisdiction's peculiar treatment must explain the treatment for readers outside it; so the measurement choice is defended as a choice, given that accruals models, comparability measures and readability proxies all have known critiques and a paper that does not engage with them invites the referee to supply them; so the alternative explanation from finance or economics is addressed rather than left available; so the standard-setting implication, where one is claimed, names the specific provision and what would change; so the sample's accounting context is described, including the reporting regime and any transition; and so the paper says what an accounting reader learns that a finance reader would not. Papers framed this way survive the first referee.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished manuscripts, data and referee correspondence. We are editors rather than accounting scholars, and we offer no view on your methods, measures or findings. What we can do is make the accounting contribution visible in the first paragraph.