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Accounting publications serve as important channels of knowledge dissemination and discipline advancement. This dissertation examines the characteristics and citations' intellectual structure of accounting research using bibliometrics and graphical data mining techniques. This assessment contributes to accounting thought development literature in three areas. The first essay examines the development of research characteristics and intellectual structure of The Accounting Review (TAR). Findings indicate that financial accounting has been the principal research area for recent TAR publications. Grounding theories have been drawn primarily from accounting, economics, and finance disciplines which are considered foundational to TAR research. Archival-primary, quantitative-regression and statistical modeling were found to be the most commonly applied methods. The top-cited and co-cited reference groups that led to the formation of TAR community are identified and compared across three temporal periods. The continuous development of technology has been identified as a significant influence on accounting as a profession. In the last twenty years, auditing tasks have gradually shifted from a traditional paper-and-pencil format to a more electronic form. The second essay examines the ways in which methods for continuous auditing research have progressed and the manner in which the intellectual community has approached its study. A synthesis is presented by providing an overview on the growth of continuous auditing since the late 1980s, classifying research content, and applying citation and co-citation analyses to identify influential research, scholars and revealing main reference clusters that contribute to the formation of the field. Acknowledging one of the important goals of accounting research is to understand human information processing, decision making and its consequences, this essay examines chronologically the development of behavioral accounting research field using taxonomic classification and comparative analysis approaches. A comprehensive four dimensional taxonomy is created to shed light the characteristics of behavioral accounting research by systematically analyzing its research methods, accounting area, topical behavioral focuses and subtopical behavioral components. By comparing findings across six decades, this essay reveals multiple clustered attributes of behavioral accounting research (e.g., audit judgment, management controls, budgeting process, and auditor-client relationship) and its changes over time. Implications are addressed on emerging subfields and future research trend.