Should Research on Accounting in Africa incorporate Paradigm Shifts?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper evaluates recent reviews of accounting research in Africa. These prompt consideration of nurturing research approaches encompassing diverse paradigms. Accounting research in highly ranked accounting journals has contained a small proportion of articles on Africa, predominately on larger, richer countries with developed capital markets. However, a gradual paradigm shift is apparent. About 51% of published African accounting research has employed qualitative methods unlike that on other developing countries, especially in Asia, where quantitative market-based research has been dominant. A gradual shift in African accounting research philosophies and methodologies has accompanied investigations of topics more pertinent to Africa, such as attaining Sustainable Development Goals. Significant numbers of African accounting articles in lesser or unranked English language journals, and in non-English language journals, especially in French, German, Portuguese, and Italian exist but fell outside the scope of this exercise. They need reviewing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.073 | 0.090 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.034 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".