Leeds University Business School shows academic excellence in audit research

The challenge

Leeds University’s School of Accounting and Finance is ranked in the UK’s top five.

When PhD students get their work published in the most reputable journals – ranked A3 or A4 - it sets their career off to a great start and raises the school’s profile.

But getting published is a competitive field – it's what all the world’s best business schools are aiming for.

Research usually involves pulling data from many sources and then making it useable.

It’s a manual, time-consuming and uninspiring process of transferring data from PDF or Word to Excel.

Students would rather focus on developing their ideas.

The solution

Associate Professor in Accounting and two-time winner of the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence, Dr Alan Duboisée de Ricquebourg , used his international experience as an external auditor to find a solution for his students.

They needed something to:

• Support new ideas: Giving students the data they need to power original research.
• Speed up research: with easily accessible data-feeds through a web browser or the Wharton Research Data Service.
• Set them apart: Quality data in one place and ready to use.

Implementation and impact

The school introduced Ideagen’s audit intelligence solution which provided students with a number of important benefits:

• The depth and breadth of information needed to support research ideas
• Streamlined data collection negating manual extraction from multiple sources
• More time to focus on deeper analysis
• More audit-related masters dissertations
• Data that allowed them to challenge norms

The results

In 2023, Dr Alan Duboisée de Ricquebourg and his PhD student had a research paper published in the prestigious European Accounting Review.

It gained a lot of attention because it challenged an established audit fee methodology. And there are more in the pipeline looking at critical audit matters and filings that could change the way investors assess their portfolios.

The Leeds University Business School’s position as one of the top five academic establishments for accounting and finance has been strengthened and its reputation enhanced by the first-class research of its student population.