In its early decades, the journal tended to publish articles that would be of interest to accounting practitioners, but over time it shifted towards a preference for quantitative model building and mathematical rigor.

[5] The journal's scope encompasses any accounting-related subject and any research methodology:[1] as of 2010 the proportions of papers accepted for publication across subject areas and research methods was very similar to the proportion of papers received for review.

Since the late 1970s, accounting professors have opined that the journal was sacrificing relevance for mathematical rigor, and by 1982, accounting researchers realized that mathematical analysis and empirical research were a necessary condition for articles to be accepted.

This permitted the journal "to focus more heavily on quantitative papers that became increasingly difficult for practitioners and many teachers of accounting to comprehend".

[4] Between the 1980s and the 2000s, with the rise of databases such as Compustat and EDGAR and software such as SAS, articles became mathematically more rigorous with increasingly sophisticated statistical analyses, and accounting practitioners comprised a decreasing proportion of authors in the journal.