Jayanthi Krishnan, accounting professor and Merves Senior Research Fellow, is ten months into her role as the senior editor of Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory (AJPT). AJPT is a highly ranked international journal and a publication of the Auditing Section of the American Accounting Association. As senior editor, Krishnan leads a national team of editors and upholds its overall mission. 

“It is a great honor to be appointed senior editor of AJPT,” she says. “The journal has had a series of extremely competent and dedicated senior editors. My charge is to maintain the high quality of scholarship engendered by my predecessors.”

“These months as AJPT’s senior editor have been interesting, challenging and, above all, busy,” she adds. “The COVID lockdowns have posed unique challenges for authors and reviewers as everyone grapples with online teaching, family-related pressures and more.”

Krishnan credits her editorial team with helping maintain stability in this exceptional year. She says, “Our joint responsibility is to identify research papers that are likely to contribute to the body of knowledge in different areas of audit research, steer them through a review process that is both competent and supportive of the authors’ efforts.”

COVID-19 has had unprecedented impacts on business, including audits and the audit profession. Krishnan believes it is important to examine the short and long term effects of the pandemic. “AJPT has put out a call for papers, titled ‘Research Forum on COVID-19 Implications for Audits and the Audit Profession’. The goal is to publish short yet meaningful research articles that can directly inform our understanding of how the pandemic might affect audits and the profession.” 

Krishnan’s own research is focused on archival auditing relating to audit quality, audit reporting, regulation and corporate governance. She is the recipient of the 2015 American Accounting Association Auditing Section’s Notable Contribution to the Auditing Literature Award, for her article entitled “Audit Committee Quality and Internal Control: An Empirical Analysis.”

Krishnan serves on the editorial boards of the Accounting Review, AJPT, and Accounting Horizons, and was editor at AJPT prior to being appointed as senior editor. She has served as reviewer for top journals such as the Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, Research in Accounting Studies, Management Science, Accounting Horizons and Auditing: A Journal of Theory & Practice.