Bibliometric analysis of corporate governance: Past, present, and future research agenda

Abstract

During the 1990s and 2000s, the importance of strong corporate governance (CG) was acknowledged more widely due to the occurrence of major corporate failures. As a result, there was a greater focus on corporate responsibility, transparency, disclosure practices, and risk management to enhance accountability. Moreover, following the 2008 financial crisis, CG has become an increasingly important topic in the fields of business and economics in recent years, particularly. Despite this, there has been no comprehensive examination of the subject to date. The current study seeks to address this gap by providing a retrospective analysis of the emergence of CG in business and economics. The bibliometric methodology was used in this research involving four steps: defining the aims and scope of the study; selecting appropriate techniques for the analysis; collecting data; and running the analysis and presenting the findings. Thus, bibliometric analysis was conducted on 3126 scientific research articles, retrieved from the Scopus database, which combined the keywords of CG and economics and business to identify and map the cumulative scientific knowledge in these fields by analyzing large volumes of unstructured data in a rigorous manner and exploring the emerging areas in the fields. Co-citation and bibliometric-coupling analyses were employed to determine the thematic structure of CG research from 2008 to 2022, revealing 7 clusters of research that highlight the focus and directions of the field. VOSviewer and MS Excel software were used to analyze the data and identify the most active scientific contributors in terms of countries, institutions, sources, documents, and authors. Our analysis demonstrated an increasing publication trend in CG research from 2008 onwards, with a particular emphasis on its application in business and economics. Additionally, the top three contributors to the literature were found to be the UK, the USA, and Australia. The study outlines several potential avenues for future research that could deepen the body of knowledge in this field of CG.