Exploring the Research–Practice Divide in Accounting: Insights from Text Analytics

In most learned professions, academics and practitioners collaborate on research related to issues that are important to their practice. For collaboration to be fruitful, there must be some consistency in the mutually essential research topics. In accounting, the research–practice gap is often described on the basis of perceptions. This study employs natural language processing (NLP) and topic modeling techniques to analyze nearly 18,000 abstracts from academic and practitioner journals spanning 24 years, identifying themes and trends. Our analysis uncovers several commonalities, with 17 of 34 academic topics (50 percent) overlapping with 16 of 24 practitioner topics (67 percent), representing 10,893 articles (62 percent of the corpus). Whereas this overlap indicates alignment in some areas, notable gaps persist, particularly in topics critical to practitioners. These findings offer empirical evidence of where collaboration is limited, providing insights into how future research can better bridge the divide and enhance collaboration.