Accounting, Organizations and Society: Scopus, Scope, Metrics & Submission Guide

Key Takeaways

• AOS is published by Elsevier and has a long-standing interdisciplinary focus on accounting in organizational and societal contexts.
• Elsevier lists the journal in Scopus and SSCI; the source record supplied for this profile gives Scopus Source ID 28094.
• Official ScienceDirect pages identify print ISSN 0361-3682 and online ISSN 1873-6289.
• As displayed by Elsevier when checked on 10 August 2026, the journal showed CiteScore 6.1 and Impact Factor 4.0.
• The journal follows double-anonymized peer review and typically sends suitable papers to at least two independent reviewers.
• Open access is optional; Elsevier currently lists a USD 3,840 APC excluding taxes, while the subscription route is listed with no publication fee charged to authors.
• Strong fit normally requires more than an accounting setting: the paper should illuminate behavioural, organizational, institutional, political, historical or social questions that are central to AOS.

What This Page Covers

• Journal identity and Scopus record
• Aims, scope and subjects
• Metrics and indexing
• Manuscript fit and research themes
• Author formatting requirements
• Double-anonymized peer review
• Open access and APC
• Submission workflow and ethics
• Publication-readiness support

Methodology and Source Note

This profile was prepared from the journal’s official ScienceDirect homepage, journal insights page, editorial board page, guide for authors, issue archive and the Scopus source identifier supplied with the task. Author-facing facts were prioritized from Elsevier’s live journal information. Where an important data point could not be verified from those authoritative sources, it is marked for confirmation rather than estimated.

Metrics, APCs, indexing status, editorial leadership, special issues and submission instructions can change. Before submitting, verify the current information on the official journal homepage, journal insights page, guide for authors and Scopus source profile.

Journal Information at a Glance

The table is a starting point rather than a substitute for reading the scope and recent papers. A researcher choosing between several high-quality accounting journals should pay particular attention to the journal’s intellectual orientation, not only its indexing or metric profile.

What AOS Is Trying to Understand: Aims, Scope and Research Themes

The journal describes itself as an international interdisciplinary outlet concerned with relationships among accounting and human behaviour, organizational and institutional structures and processes, and the wider socio-political environment of enterprise. That formulation is important. It positions accounting not merely as a reporting mechanism or set of technical rules, but as a set of calculative practices that can shape actors, organizations, markets, public bodies and social outcomes.

Official scope examples include the roles of accounting in organizations and society; the emergence and transformation of institutions; new public and private organizational forms; accounting, auditing, accountability, ethics and social justice; behavioural studies of accounting information; judgment and decision-making; planning, control and valuation; design and use of accounting and management-control systems; public services and not-for-profit entities; accounting regulation and standard setting; audit firms and valuation; sustainability and environmental reporting; and historical development of accounting practices and professions.

AOS explicitly welcomes work drawing on diverse theories and methodologies across the social sciences. That can include psychological, social-psychological, organizational, sociological, historical and related human-science perspectives. Methodological diversity does not remove the need for a clear theoretical contribution. A manuscript should use its evidence to advance understanding of an accounting phenomenon in its organizational or social context.

Recent issue themes reinforce the journal’s broad social-science identity

Recent ScienceDirect issues include work on strategic performance-management system design, action accountability and job autonomy, audit regulation and management information, sustainability and climate-change accounting, ESG assurance and consumer responses. The mix illustrates how AOS can connect accounting with organization design, psychology, regulation, sustainability and institutional environments rather than confining itself to a single accounting subfield.

Understanding Its Scopus Coverage and Journal Metrics

Elsevier’s official journal insights page lists AOS in Scopus, the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and alongside SJR and SNIP information. The source data supplied for this article identifies Scopus Source ID 28094. This matters for researchers whose universities distinguish between Scopus-indexed and non-indexed journals, but the database record should always be checked live because source coverage and institutional rules can change.

Metric strength can help a researcher understand visibility, but it should not override scope. A paper that is poorly aligned with AOS may be better served by a lower-metric journal whose audience and editorial remit genuinely match the research question.

Is Accounting, Organizations and Society a Good Match for Your Research?

A useful fit test is to write one sentence answering: What does this study teach us about accounting as a behavioural, organizational, institutional or social phenomenon? If the answer is compelling and central to the paper, AOS may be worth investigating further. If the answer feels secondary to a purely technical result, the manuscript may need a different outlet or a more substantive theoretical framing.

Questions to ask before choosing the journal

• Does the paper’s research question speak to accounting in an organizational, behavioural or societal context?
• Is the theoretical contribution visible beyond the empirical setting?
• Can you identify several recent AOS articles that engage a comparable phenomenon, theory or methodology?
• Does the paper explain why AOS readers should care, rather than assuming an accounting setting is enough?
• Would the manuscript still look like an AOS paper if the journal name were removed from the cover letter?

As a practical publication-readiness step, read several recent issues and compare your manuscript’s introduction, theory development, evidence and discussion with the kinds of conversations the journal is currently publishing. This is general selection guidance, not an official AOS requirement.

What Does the Journal Publish?

Recent ScienceDirect issues identify the journal’s core published content as research articles, alongside editorials and special sections or collections where relevant. The journal also runs calls for papers and thematic collections. The guide for authors used for this profile does not present a broad menu promising that every conventional article category—such as generic narrative reviews—will be considered. Authors with a non-standard article format should therefore verify suitability with current journal instructions rather than assume acceptance of the format.

The practical implication is that a submission should be designed as a substantive scholarly contribution. The official scope welcomes diverse methodologies, so originality can come through theory, evidence, research design or the way a study reframes an accounting phenomenon. Method diversity is not the same as format flexibility: follow the journal’s current manuscript instructions precisely.

Preparing and Formatting a Manuscript for AOS

The official guide requires editable source files for the full submission. Word manuscripts should use .doc or .docx; LaTeX submissions should use .tex. A PDF is not accepted as the source file. Word manuscripts should use a single-column layout, and authors are advised to remove unnecessary strikethrough or underlining and run spelling and grammar checks.

Double-anonymized file separation

Because AOS uses double-anonymized review, the title page and anonymized manuscript need to be separated. The title page should contain the article title, author names, affiliations, acknowledgements, declaration of interest, corresponding-author postal address and email. The anonymized manuscript should include the main text, references, figures and tables but exclude identifying author names, affiliations and other clues that compromise anonymity.

Abstract, keywords and highlights

• The abstract must be concise, factual and no longer than 250 words.
• Provide 1 to 7 English-language keywords for indexing.
• Highlights are encouraged as a separate editable file: 3 to 5 bullet points, each no more than 85 characters including spaces.
• Use consistent American or British English rather than mixing conventions.

Tables, figures, data and references

Tables should be editable text rather than images. Equations should be editable where possible. The guide allows supplementary materials and encourages research-data linking. Reference-list accuracy matters because incorrect names, titles, years or pagination can prevent linking to abstracting and indexing services. The journal advises using DOIs where available.

What Happens When You Submit?

The online submission system collects manuscript details and files, converts them into a review PDF and handles editorial correspondence. Initial editorial assessment determines whether the manuscript is suitable for the journal. If it proceeds, AOS states that it will typically be sent to a minimum of two reviewers for independent expert assessment. The editors make the final decision on acceptance or rejection.

Publisher-reported timing

The journal insights page currently reports 5 days from submission to first decision, 79 days from submission to decision after review, 814 days from submission to acceptance and 16 days from acceptance to online publication. Those numbers should be read as journal-level historical indicators, not promises. Revision rounds, reviewer availability and the nature of the paper can substantially affect an individual timeline.

The journal does not publicly state an acceptance rate in the official materials used for this profile, so this article does not estimate one.

Open Access, Subscription Publication and Fees

AOS supports open access but is not an open-access-only journal. Elsevier currently displays an open-access APC of USD 3,840 excluding taxes, noting that the amount may be reduced during submission where an agreement or other eligibility applies. The publisher also lists a subscription option with no publication fee charged to authors, with access provided to subscribers.

This distinction matters for budgeting. An author does not necessarily need to pay the APC simply to publish in the journal; the APC applies when the open-access route is selected. Funding mandates, institutional agreements and desired reuse licenses can affect that decision. Verify the live fee, tax treatment and institutional coverage before committing funds.

Publication Ethics and Responsible Use of AI

AOS directs authors to Elsevier’s publishing-ethics policies. Submission implies that the work has not been published previously except in permitted forms such as a preprint, abstract, lecture, thesis or registered report; that it is not under consideration elsewhere; and that all authors and responsible authorities have approved publication. The publisher may use screening tools to check compliance with journal policies.

Authorship requires substantial contribution, participation in drafting or critical revision, final approval and accountability for the work. Competing interests and funding sources must be disclosed. Because the journal uses double-anonymized review, acknowledgements belong on the title page rather than in the anonymized manuscript.

Elsevier’s current generative-AI policy allows authors to use AI tools as support in manuscript preparation only with human oversight, verification and accountability. Where generative AI has been used in a way requiring disclosure, the guide instructs authors to add a declaration before the references. AI tools must not be listed as authors. Basic grammar, spelling and reference-checking tools do not require the same declaration under the guidance quoted by the journal.

For ethical publication support, an editor can improve language, structure, clarity, consistency and journal alignment without fabricating data, inventing citations, manipulating peer review or replacing the researcher’s scholarly contribution.

Publication-Readiness Checklist Before Submission

How Contentxprtz Can Support Ethical Publication Readiness

Contentxprtz can help researchers prepare a manuscript for journal submission without claiming influence over editorial decisions. Relevant support may include academic editing, proofreading, manuscript assessment, journal formatting, reference and citation checks, cover-letter editing and reviewer-response editing.

For an AOS submission, useful support often means checking whether the manuscript’s argument consistently connects accounting to organizational or social questions, whether theory and evidence are communicated clearly, whether the anonymized review file is properly prepared, and whether language problems obscure the contribution. The author remains responsible for the research, claims, evidence, citations, authorship and final submission.