Individual skill
jar-topic-selection
Use when choosing or sharpening a research question for a Journal of Accounting Research (JAR) manuscript — testing whether it is a real accounting question with a credible setting, JAR fit, and identification potential before any data work begins. Locks the question; it does not build the mechanism (jar-theory-development) or design the test (jar-methods).
Journal-of-Accounting-Research-Skills/skills/jar-topic-selection/SKILL.md
Source commit 932eb23331721b16e967c59f093781be1928b498
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- Observed behavior
- Network or broad shell
- Last checked
- Nov 9, 2026
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- Repository last updated
- Sep 27, 2026
- License
- MIT
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# Topic Selection & JAR Fit (jar-topic-selection)
## When to trigger
- You have a dataset or a setting but not yet a question that matters for accounting
- You are unsure whether the idea fits JAR versus TAR, JAE, RAST, or CAR
- The question is "is X correlated with Y?" with no clear stakes for accounting
- You are deciding whether to target the **Ray Ball JAR Annual Conference** or the **Registered Reports** track
## What JAR is looking for
JAR publishes original research in all areas of accounting and accounting-related topics, drawing on finance, economics, statistics, psychology, and sociology. The journal's gravitational center is **empirical-archival capital-markets** research in the **Ball-Brown** tradition: how accounting information is produced, disclosed, audited, and used by investors, analysts, creditors, regulators, and managers. A JAR-fit question almost always (a) concerns an accounting/disclosure/auditing/standard-setting phenomenon, (b) lives in a setting with a **credible source of identifying variation** (a standard change, a regulation, a discontinuity, a shock), and (c) has clear **economic stakes** — it changes how we think information flows into prices, contracts, or decisions.
## The fit test (run before collecting data)