Management Accounting: Past, Present, and Future of Double-Entry Bookkeeping and Ledger

Abstract

The paper investigates the current state of studies on double-entry bookkeeping and ledgers in accounting through a bibliometrics analysis from 1990 to 2021. The study allows for interpretation of the development of accounting information systems, as they are evolving under the impulse given by recent disruptive information technology. We use a sample of 230 publications collected from the Web of Science. We adopted VOSviewer software to illustrate different relational techniques: citation, co-citation, keyword co-occurrence, and bibliographic coupling analyses. The results highlight the emergence of some recent research streams that appear weakly connected with traditional prior studies on the foundation of modern accounting, albeit sharing the same roots with seminal contributions of accounting history in terms of implications for trustiness, morality, and communication. The main finding is a better understanding of the growing interest in double-entry bookkeeping and ledger, focusing on blockchain and its dimensions. This study contributes to the existing literature on the significance of double-entry bookkeeping and ledger by enhancing it with a much more comprehensive, reliable picture given by bibliometrics analysis. The universality of accounting language is called upon to describe new “genealogies of calculation” by converging professional and academic efforts in a field that can benefit widely from a transdisciplinary approach to research.