Crowdsourcing tags in accounting and finance : review, analysis, and emerging issues / Daniel O'Leary

This paper examines the use of crowdsourcing informal and discretionary tags in accounting and finance. Crowd-provided tags employ short amounts of text to capture some characteristic(s) of documents, messages, financial information, and other objects. Increasingly, tagging is being used in systems for knowledge management, including facilitating search and categorization. The paper reviews previous research on tagging, summarizes accounting applications of crowdsourced tags, investigates problems associated with using crowdsourced tags in accounting, and generates a number of potential research issues. Empirical analysis of Delicious and Twitter data are used to illustrate some of the concepts associated with the emerging technology of crowdsourced tags in accounting and finance. Empirical analysis finds that users provide different tags for the same concept, potentially making it difficult to use tags for search purposes. In addition, users appear to generate redundant tags, with many tags simply capturing object title information.

Accountancy.