A scientometric analysis of Accountability literature: current status, emerging trends

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 accounting & management faculty, allameh tabatabaei university, tehran. iran

2 accounting & management , allameh tabatabaei university, tehran, iran

Abstract

Today, fulfilling accountability is considered one of the main responsibilities of governments. Due to the importance of the subject, a significant amount of research efforts in the field of public sector accounting have been devoted to developing the literature in this sector. In the first stage of the research method, published articles in the field of accountability, transparency, and responsibility were collected from the Scopus database between 1977 and 2025. In the second stage, monitoring documents and articles were selected and 2028 articles were selected. VOSviewer software was also used to analyze the articles. The findings indicate the existence of five main streams of research, including the relationship between accounting science and accountability, assessing accountability, disclosure adequacy (in order to assess how accountability is fulfilled), critiquing and examining the views of researchers, and various models of accountability performance and assessment. The results of the study indicate that cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin), artificial intelligence, financial technology (FinTech), and blockchain have entered the literature of this field, and the allocation of 14% of all citations in the last 5 years to the aforementioned keywords indicates the increasing interest of researchers in emerging research lines. It is expected that the future trend of research will lean towards emerging trends such as the impact of artificial intelligence The impact of artificial intelligence and blockchain on the improvement of subsystems of the accountability system will also be considered.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

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History

  • Receive Date: 27 June 2025
  • Revise Date: 22 April 2026
  • Accept Date: 25 April 2026

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