Last year I was involved in a project sponsored by the FPSC Foundation in Canada to review published research in the field of financial planning from Canada, US, UK and Australia between 2003 and mid-2010 when we did the project. The FPSC Foundation supports research in the field and were trying to determine topics where more research focus was required.
The review drew articles from over 360 academic journals and there were a number of interesting findings:
- There were over 2000 peer reviewed articles published in the topic areas
- Articles published per year effectively doubled over the timeframe
- Not surprisingly FPA’s Journal of Financial Planning was the single more active source of research with about 20% of published articles.
- There were over 2600 different authors, 80% of whom only published one paper. There were seven authors who collaborated in 10 or more papers,
- The two most prolific authors were Moshe Milevsky and John E. Grable. Grable will be speaking Friday at 11:15am at FPA San Diego.
There are obviously a lot of other findings and I encourage people to read the full article which was just published in the Journal of Personal Finance in August. Also check out www.planipedia.org the financial planning wiki were the full list of the 2000 articles are available. Just search for Research.
I firmly believe objective research is a fundamental requirement for us to continue to evolve the profession of financial planning. A good place to start is to understand what is already there.