COMPARISON OF THE TERMS CREATIVE ACCOUNTING, EARNINGS MANAGEMENT AND FRAUDULENT ACCOUNTING THROUGH BIBLIOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

Research background: The article focuses on the issues of creative accounting, earnings management, and fraudulent accounting, which are global phenomena. These concepts are well known globally, as they are dealt with by many world-renowned authors. In this study, we applied bibliometric analysis to these concepts to reveal their interconnectedness. The research was conducted on a sample of more than 19,000 articles. Purpose of the article: The main goal of the study is to use the VosViewer design and visualisation program to capture and record the most common terms associated with the terms, ‘creative accounting’, ‘revenue management’, and ‘fraudulent accounting’, and to show a biometric network of the most commonly used terms. Methods: To capture and illustrate important words associated with the above terms, the VosViewer program was used, which drew mind maps that represented the words and expressions that were closest to the topic. Scientific articles from the Web of Science database, which contains many world-class articles related to the topic, were used as input data. Findings & Value added: The results of the study provided an interesting insight into the keywords associated with the issues of creative accounting, revenue management, and fraudulent accounting. The results show that the keywords and phrases are related, as several of them are repeated in each of the terms mentioned. This means that, although these terms are different in nature, they are nevertheless connected by many words and phrases. However, it remains necessary to observe that each of the given terms appears on a different colour of fraud (white, grey, or black fraud).