Why don't we just ask them – do finance practitioners read academic research?

Purpose – The article attempts to determine whether academic research in the area of finance has a direct link to the practitioners in the field. Design/methodology/approach – This paper used a survey of over 50 finance practitioners to ask their opinion on the relevance of academic finance journals to their respective jobs. Findings – The results suggest that most business practitioners are more interested in proprietary research than in generally distributed academic research, the academic peer‐review process seems to reduce the interest of practitioners in academic research due to the time lag between the findings of research and their publication, and the statistical significance of academic research results does not interest practitioners as much as the immediate relevance of the research findings to their respective jobs. Originality/value – A review of the literature suggests this might be one of the first papers to actually test the hypothesis that academic finance research has a direct transference to the finance industry.