Working Papers and Scholarly Research in Finance

Abstract Working papers are an important source of information for finance researchers. Almost ten percent of the citations from a sample of article bibliographies from leading finance journals were to working papers. The citations were primarily to working papers issued by academic institutions during the previous four years. Checking the citations against three important electronic resources covering working papers-EconLit, IDEAS, and the Social Science Research Network-revealed that fewer than half of the cited working papers were included and only a small percentage were offered in full text.