Review-paper

· Background Paper / Literature review

Research Question

· What skills identified in the literature as being critical in an education curriculum of forensic accounting are presently absent or given little emphasis Saudis Universities?)

·

· What do industry and academic experts perceive to be the highest priority forensic accounting education and training content for practicing CPAs in Saudi Arabia?)

Subsections (e.g., Introduction, Review of Literature, Method, Results, Conclusions)

Article 1 Reference List / Article 1 Appendices (if applicable)

My Adviser Feedback About this Question:

(This would be much easier to research, since you acquire a list of skills in the accounting literature and then compare it to published or archival documents relating to Saudi programs.)

What you have described looks like a plausible topic for an interesting paper. At the moment, you have not given me enough to provide detailed comments--when the paper is more developed, I will gladly do so. I will therefore limit my comments to some general thoughts:

1) In your introduction, you do not specifically reference any of the citations you provide at the end. It is a good idea to do this as you proceed with writing, otherwise you may have trouble remembering them when it comes time to finish the paper. You will need these citations to back up your assertions.

2) You need some existing work to anchor your study. There are a couple of ways you might go. First, you could focus on some general theory regarding fraud (which seems to be the direction your introduction is taking), such as the fraud triangle. You could then build a case for analyzing a curriculum based on its mapping to the theory. Second, what may be a better alternative, you could take a model forensic accounting curriculum--perhaps from the U.S. or Europe (or both)--and build your analysis around comparing it to what you find in Saudi Arabia.

3) Because this paper is specifically focused on Saudi Arabia, you need to provide some context regarding ways in which the Saudi experience is likely to be similar or unique when compared with the western experience, your background sections provide the basis for your discussion section after you have presented your findings. You need to have some material in your background section that you can use for the purpose of the analysis you present in the discussion section.

Template for (Muma Business Review) Research Question Review (RQR) Submission

Overview

An MBR RQR article is expected to:

· Identify a research question of practical importance to managers

· Present a summary of the results of a systematic search of the research literature related to the question; this will normally be done in tabular form

· List the key takeaways of the search

· Identify strengths and weaknesses of the literature in terms of addressing the question being asked

Such an article would normally be around 20 pages.

Acceptance of an MBR RQR submission will take into consideration:

· The significance of the question being asked

· The degree to which the results provide value to managers and researchers. It should be noted that such value might derive from two nearly opposite sources. Specifically:

· Research findings are identified that could provide novel insights into business and managerial practices, introduce concepts likely to be broadly accessible to MBR readers, offer ideas that offer a pathway to best practices

· Existing research appears to offer little of value in addressing the significant question, thereby presenting an opportunity to valuable future manager-researcher collaboration.

· Presentation of findings in a manner likely to engage readers.

· The degree to which it seems likely to contribute to business and managerial knowledge.

Instructions

· Save this document under the name to be used with the RQR submission

· Delete the “Instructions” page

· On the first page, replace the generic information with your specific information:

· Leave the “Research Question Review” heading

· Title: Use the Title style, centered.

· (Author information will be submitted in the review system)

· Styles should be used for all headings

· Main headings should use Heading 1 style

· Sub headings should use Heading 2 style

· Heading 3, Etc.

· Graphics should be embedded as .jpg, .gif or .png images. Do not use Office drawings.

· References should be listed at the end, in APA format

· Fill in the information specified in the Reviewer Appendix at the end of the template. This information will not be included in the published version of the article, but will be used during the review process.

Research Question Review Cover Page

The Research Question Goes Here

Tagline

In this section, place a 25-50 word paragraph that captures the importance of the research question. This will not appear in the article itself, but will be used in the contents. Since the question itself is the title, it should not be repeated in the tagline.

Keywords

Put 5-10 keywords that will be used to index the article and make it easier to find when a search is done.

Executive Summary

A 150-250 word summary that summarizes the importance of the research question and the results of the review. This will appear at the beginning of the article.

Research Question Review

The Research Question Goes Here

Introduction

An RQR article will normally begin with a brief description of the context of the RQR, hopefully half a page of less. It should introduce the topic focus of the RQR and how the RQR came about. This section should avoid being a repetition of the executive summary.

Protocol

A very brief summary of the protocol used to search the literature should be included here. It might include the databases searched, the number of articles downloaded and the number of articles summarized. A more extensive description of the protocol should be included in the reviewer appendix. This section should not be more than a paragraph.

Literature Summary

The preferred presentation of a literature summary is a table. There are a variety of possible formats that are possible. If a large number of articles have relevance to the question, with many reporting similar conclusions, then the following table format may be most appropriate:

Where a smaller number of references is considered, and each reference has more significance, it might be more appropriate to use a table format such as the following:

The ordering of the tables should be given careful consideration. Where a conceptual organization can be used that helps clarify question, an additional column might be warranted. For example, the following table (Gill, 2006, p. 8) shows a summary that addresses the question “What is task complexity?” organized by classes, using the Findings-Multiple Sources (Table 1) format and adding a column to the left.

The next table (Gill, 2012) illustrates a modified version of the Single Source-Multiple Findings tables, where the source remains on the left and the title is omitted. In this table, research type is used as the organizing principle and the theme of the research and findings are separated. Both of these example tables would likely be considered too academic in their presentation for the MBR audience. Moreover, these second of these table surveys an area of research, rather than focusing on a specific research question of interest to practice, which is the preferred target of MBR RQR articles. For this reason, tables such as these would more likely be found in categories such as relevant theory articles, empirical findings articles and research case studies. Nevertheless, the formats can be adapted to RQR articles.

Discussion

In this section, the results of the RQR are synthesized by the author and, ideally, framed in terms of the broader academic research literature. Of particular interest are observations that findings from many sources seem to confirm each other and observations that they tend to conflict with each other or fail to replicate.

In some cases, the table of findings itself may provide sufficient value to justify publication. In other cases, the results may be so inadequate that there is little value in attempting to synthesize them. In these cases, to avoid repetition it may make sense to go directly to conclusions.

Conclusions

The summary of the key takeaways from the RQR. Normally, these should be under a page and should be sufficiently self-contained that a reader can jump to them and still understand them.

References

APA format should be used for all references, e.g.,