Exploring the Scientific Landscape of Internal Audit Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Addressing the heavily increased attention on internal auditing in the post-SOX era, this paper aims to unravel the scientific metamorphosis of the topic within current accounting research, including the different scientific subareas that define it. In an attempt to extent the scant body of literature reviews that has focused on the internal audit function (IAF), we pursue an empirical approach to analyze the scientific structures and provide a variety of directions for future internal audit research. In this context, citation patterns extracted from 170 research articles published in five major accounting journals are being studied by combining co-citation and social network analysis in order to investigate different existing research domains of internal auditing and to discover the core work that has been done in this area. The scientific landscape of internal auditing can be characterized as profoundly fragmented and deeply rooted in different adjacent domains of accounting research. Identified subcategories from which research on internal auditing is derived can be summarized as Corporate Governance, Auditor Independence, Auditing Professionalization, Audit Committee Effectiveness, Reliance on Internal Auditing, Internal Control over Financial Reporting, and finally the Regulatory Framework. Additionally, results reveal the existence of a pivotal nucleus of research that emphasizes the increasingly important construct of internal audit quality. The focus of this study lies on the analysis of major accounting journals, namely The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting Economics and Accounting, Organizations and Society and is restricted to the years from 1926 to 2016.