On retraction of papers by academic Journals

I am quite pessimistic about this. All that one needs these days to publish accounting papers are databases and an army of serfs who can massage those data with arcane statistical methods that statisticians themselves gave up a long time ago. If this business model becomes the standard operating model for academic accounting research, we are in for serious trouble. However, that this is in fact becoming the standard business model is borne by the fact that papers come from schools that can afford these (money for databases, serfs, and expensive faculty to serve as overseers over the serfs). If you don't believe, look at the slew of papers coming out of schools in Hong Kong (and to a much lesser extent from China)  the past decade or so.

I stopped reading the Accounting Review a long time ago when the papers started looking very cookie-cutter-ish. They add little to our understanding of the phenomena under study, and they do not add anything we know about the methodology used or the research methods utilised.

I see brighter prospects for non-mainstream journals and established journals in collateral fields such as Statistics, Economics, Psychology, Sociology, and Computer Science. These days it is routine to see articles entirely outside the field. The best papers I have seen on social network analysis have NOT been in sociology journals but in Physics journals, and the best articles on Operations Research I have seen have been in Computer Science, and so on.

But there is a difference between those fields and accounting. In those fields publications outside one's field are respected. In accounting only publications in the very small number of anointed journals are acceptable. If we persist with this ostrich's-head-in-the-sand policy,  academic accounting might as  well be on its way to being a sterile and useless field.