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car-topic-selection

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Use when choosing or sharpening a research question for a Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR) manuscript — testing fit with CAR's deliberately method-agnostic, all-topic-areas accounting scope and picking the research tradition (archival, experimental, analytical, field, qualitative) that the question demands.

Contemporary-Accounting-Research-Skills/skills/car-topic-selection/SKILL.md

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# Topic Selection & CAR Fit (car-topic-selection)

## When to trigger

- You have a phenomenon or dataset but no sharp accounting research question
- You are unsure whether the topic fits CAR versus a narrower or non-accounting outlet
- You cannot yet say which research tradition (archival, experimental, analytical, field, qualitative) the question requires
- A coauthor asks "is this a CAR paper or a finance/economics paper?"

## What CAR is looking for

CAR welcomes "interesting and intellectually rigorous work in **all topic areas of accounting**, using **any appropriate method**, and based in **any discipline or research tradition**." This is a genuine big-tent mandate: financial reporting, auditing and assurance, managerial/cost accounting, taxation, disclosure, accounting information in capital markets, governance, and accounting's role in organizations and society are all in scope. The defining test is therefore **not** method but whether the question advances understanding of **accounting** — its production, properties, use, or consequences. A question that merely uses accounting data to answer a pure-finance asset-pricing or pure-economics question is a weaker fit than one whose answer changes how we understand accounting itself.

## Pick the research tradition the question demands
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