Special Edition of the Australian Accounting Review: Information Systems Research

One of the exciting things on the Information Technology & Management Centre of Excellence's work plans for this year is a special edition of the Australian Accounting Review. If you don't know of the AAR (and if you studied an Honours degree in business over the past twenty-five years, you probably should know about it), it is the pre-eminent Australian research journal for accounting and business.

Speaking for myself, I do occasionally get a little twitch in my eye when I think back to all those research papers I had to critique out of the AAR, but I'm getting over that. Honest.

At any rate, a call for papers has been issued, and the response has been very enthusiastic - much better perhaps than we had anticipated, and the editorial committee (Dr John Campbell, Shauna Kelly, and myself) are now finalising the papers that will be included in the special edition.

I will probably will document (OK, definitely will) the launch of the special edition. This is a project I am particularly proud that the COE has been able to bring to fruition, and the quality of the papers that have been submitted - from some of Australia's foremost researchers - indicates a future need for such a journal. However, at this time, it is a one-off and the COE will review the project to see whether we do this more often - at the moment, I am thinking biannually, but perhaps it's an annual thing (or if it's a complete bomb, we'll call it a success and not repeat the experience).

I suspect the whole "complete bomb" thing is not an option, just on the basis of my reading of the papers I have seen so far. Australian research is a strong thing, and information systems is no less strong than any other area of Australian inventiveness, so I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. I am looking forward to the final fruition of something we first talked about at least three years ago (when Tony Hayes was the Chair), and if this was the only thing we could achieve, I would have been a happy man. The fact that we're almost done with our current work program is testament to the dedication and assistance of the people on the COE, on our policy and research advisor Jan Barned, and more particularly on the ability of CPA Australia to attract and foster the abilities of very talented people.

Who do I mean? Well, perhaps you'll have to beg, borrow or steal a copy of the Special Edition of the Australian Accounting Review: Information Systems Research. I'm sure it'll be a best-seller.