Introduction

This paper provides an overview of the state of research in the fields of accounting and finance in UK universities over the period 2001–2007, based on the outputs assessed by the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) Accounting and Finance Subpanel 35 (SP35) in this subject area. It builds, and expands, upon the subject overview report, also written by the members of SP35, which was published on the RAE 2008 website

By way of introduction and context-setting, 14 units, comprising 161.6 FTE staff, made direct submissions to the panel (in comparison to the 20 units with 202.2 FTE staff who submitted directly to the Accounting and Finance panel for the 2001 exercise), with the quality profiles awarded being published. SP35, however, was asked for cross-referral advice by the Business and Management Sub-Panel (SP36) with respect to the evaluation of nearly three times as many outputs as those submitted directly. This can be contrasted with the situation in 2001 where cross-referred outputs were approximately 40% larger in number than those directly submitted. The advice providedwas fed into the overall output profiles produced by SP36 for the units submitted to them. Overall, the number of outputs assessed by the sub-panel, whether directly or via advice offered to SP36, increased by approximately 25% between the 2001 and 2008 RAE exercises