For this assignment, take a look through both the practitioner-oriented and scholarly-oriented journals discussed in the background readings. Pick a topic in finance that interests you. Then find two articles that relate to this topic from any of the four practitioner journals featured on the background page. Then find two articles on the same topic in any of the scholarly journals. These can be articles in any of the Google Scholar rankings, or any of the top 50 finance journals listed on Scimago. You will be writing about these four articles for this assignment.
Once you have found your four articles and have reviewed them carefully, write a 5- to 6-page paper answering the following questions:
Provide a brief overview of each article and also explain why you chose the article and what you found interesting about it. Don’t devote too much space to summarizing the articles, it is more important to emphasize what you found interesting.
What major differences in substance and style did you find between the practitioner articles and the scholarly articles? Be clear and specific. This portion should be one and a half to two pages in length.
Which of the four articles did you find the most interesting or useful? Which did you find the least interesting or the least useful? Be as specific as you can. Rate the articles both on substance and presentation.
Based on these articles, what type of future research would you propose on this topic to follow up on the research of these authors? Is there anything from your own workplace or industry that could be used to investigate this topic further?
Background readings
Journal of Applied Corporate Finance was originally started by the investment bank Morgan Stanley and covers a range of issues from the perspective of corporate financial strategies.
Journal of Portfolio Management covers financial issues from the point of view of the investor.
Financial Analysts Journal is the official journal of the CFA Institute, the organization that gives out the Certified Financial Analyst Certificate. Articles in this journal tend to be a bit more technical than articles in other practitioner journals.
Journal of Wealth Management presents research from a financial planning perspective.
Now that you’ve reviewed the practitioner-oriented journals, take a look at some of the academic finance journals that specialize in more scholarly and theory-oriented research.
Here are a couple of scholarly finance journals that are highly ranked and are available in Business Source Complete:
The Review of Financial Studies is one of the toughest finance journals in the world to get published in and has highly technical articles.
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis: As you can probably tell its name, this journal also publishes highly technical papers.