ABSTRACT: All academic disciplines must establish procedures to protect the quality of their knowledge. This usually entails a process of peer review whose function is to make judgments about the value of scholarship. The impact of these judgments is to elevate some scholarship to the highest plateaus of prominence, to prevent other work from publication, and to place the remainder in a system of stratification. The people who perform this function have considerable power to shape the literature, and therefore form a worthwhile object of study. This paper considers the editorial review board of The Accounting Review at three points in time over a 20‐year period. The results suggest that institutional concentration of the gatekeepers has modestly decreased over time. However, other differences suggest that the scholarly representativeness of the group has diminished.
