As contribuições da tese de William Paton (1922) — Accounting Theory

The aim of this paper is to identify the main contributions to the impact factor of William Andrew Paton’s thesis (1922). This thesis was developed a century ago but remains as a current and relevant data source to understand the accounting theory over the years. Even in an embryonic form, Paton’s work brings a contribution to the idea of measurement and an introduction to the concept of “current cost.” It is an exploratory research, which used the method employed by Oppenheim and Renn (1978) to analyze citation typologies, through which we have been able to observe that most of the citations were classified in the c typology. Results also show, on the one hand, that the main contributions of Paton’s work (1922) are current cost, goodwill, and postulates. On the other hand, instead of exploring Paton’s work (1922), many researchers limit themselves to making citations (introduced by the Latin preposition apud) from accounting books that cite this work.