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The purpose of this Editorial is to reflect on the potentials and challenges of qualitative research in financial accounting and introduce the four papers included in this Special Issue.

The authors draw on and discuss extant literature and the papers included in the Special Issue to develop our assessment of the current state of the field of qualitative financial accounting research and possible future paths ahead.

The authors observe that qualitative research on financial accounting is still an emerging field with substantial further research potential.

The authors outline future potentials for qualitative accounting research.

This Editorial contributes to studies on the state of academic research in (financial) accounting.

This paper aims to study the internationalisation of management accounting research in the German-speaking countries and to analyse whether researchers from these countries rely on their intellectual heritage or adapt to the conventions prevailing in the international community.

This paper provides a research taxonomy of 273 papers published by management accounting researchers from the German-speaking countries between 2005 and 2018 in domestic and international journals with regard to topics, settings, methods, data origins and theories of these papers. The study also systematically compares these publications with the publications by international scholars as synthesised in selected prior bibliometric studies.

The findings suggest that German-speaking researchers increasingly adapt to the conventions prevailing in the international management accounting literature. Indicative of this development is the crowding out of traditional core areas of German-speaking management accounting such as cost accounting by management control topics. The study also finds that German-speaking researchers increasingly rely on the research methods and theories prevailing internationally.

The paper documents considerable changes in the publications of management accounting researchers from the German-speaking countries. These changes raise the question how other national research communities internationalise and whether these processes lead to a greater homogenisation of international management accounting research, which might impair the advancement of management accounting knowledge.

This paper provides first empirical evidence on how management accounting research conducted in the German-speaking countries has changed in the course of the internationalisation of the research community and builds an important basis for future research in other geographic settings.