Accounting Horizons – Conversations about the use of AI in academic research

AI Disrupts Accounting Scholarship

The use of artificial intelligence in academic research has shifted from fringe experiment to mainstream practice in accounting since generative tools became widely accessible in 2023. By late 2025, editors at Accounting Horizons, a prominent journal published by the American Accounting Association, issued an editorial confronting the phenomenon head-on, highlighting both its potential to accelerate scholarly work and the serious risks it poses to research quality and credibility.

This moment reflects broader pressures in the field. Accounting research directly informs the development of financial reporting standards, audit methodologies, and tax policies that govern corporate behavior globally. As AI tools handle literature searches, hypothesis formulation, data processing, and even initial drafting, researchers produce more output faster—but at the cost of potential hallucinations, fabricated citations, or diluted original insight.

The stakes are concrete. Journals now require explicit disclosures of AI use, and failure to comply can lead to manuscript rejection or post-publication corrections. For individual academics, especially those on the tenure track, over-reliance on AI without transparency invites peer scrutiny or formal investigations. Meanwhile, the profession at large faces a disconnect: practitioners increasingly embed AI in daily workflows—with adoption nearing universality by 2026—while scholars debate boundaries to ensure academic output remains reliable enough to guide those same practitioners.

Less visible is the trade-off between democratized access to advanced analysis and the erosion of traditional skill-building. Junior researchers gain speed but may shortcut the deep reasoning that once defined expertise, potentially weakening the pipeline of future thought leaders in accounting.