Mapping of Whistleblowing and Fraud Reporting Research: A Forty-Year Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

This research aims to identify influential cited works in whistleblowing and fraud reporting studies and to provide thematic insights and consequences for accounting and management academics interested in conducting whistleblowing research and for practitioners in increasing corporate accountability. This paper presents a bibliometric analysis (frequency analysis, citation metrics, and data visualization) from the Scopus database for 1982–2022. The author examined 12,791 citations of 200 whistleblowing-related articles using citation and co-citation analyses. The most frequent keyword has a total link strength of 1,683, with a strong link to "whistleblowing system," "accounting and fraud," and "company." A total of 285 scholars with 44 publishers in 7 countries published several whistleblowing and fraud reporting studies in different languages. The highest-ranking publisher was Springer Netherlands, with 57 publications and 4,295 citations. J.P Keenan from the Institute for Leadership and Global Education, United States is the most prolific whistleblowing writer. The author also used network visualization analysis tools to profile the centrality features of these articles' keyword clusters. Positive and negative antecedents that predict whistleblowing and fraud reporting intention were also summarized. There has never been a comprehensive review of the Scopus scientific database's whistleblower and fraud reporting publications. Keywords: bibliometric analysis, data visualization, whistleblowing, fraud reporting. DOI: https://doi.org/10.55463/hkjss.issn.1021-3619.60.11