Bibliometric Analysis of the Literature on Measuring Techniques for Manipulating Financial Statements

Abstract

Creative accounting has its background since early studies in 1975, until the present time. It continues to be a subject of great interest for the companies and interested parties. Thus, the current paper will aim to answer the following proposed research questions: 1. Which are the most used methods for detecting the manipulation of financial statements in the literature? 2. Which are the terms that are most frequently encountered in the literature associated with “creative accounting? 3. Which are the journals that have the highest frequency of articles written on the topic “creative accounting”? 4. Over time, how did research evolve in the field of creative accounting? 5. Which countries are most preoccupied in publishing regarding this topic? To answer the research question 1, the models published in the literature for measuring manipulation techniques through creative accounting were reviewed and analyzed. For the remaining research questions, a bibliometric analysis for the publications in this area was performed. For collecting the sample, articles on this topic were selected from the international Web of Science database. Following this, a bibliometric analysis of the articles was performed, using the VOSviewer program. A total of 4045 publications on creative accounting were identified. Through the bibliometric analysis we have answered research question 2, by identifying the key words that have the closest proximity to creative accounting. To answer the remaining research questions, we identified the journals with the highest frequency of publication and the countries with the highest interest on the topic. It is especially important to evaluate the quality of this many research papers and to obtain valuable information.