Thematic Attitudes Towards WhistleBlowing: A Comparative Study of Scientific Productions in Leading Countries

The present study aims to identify the characteristics of scientific productions associated with whistleblowing in the Web of Science database and to detect the thematic attitudes towards these scientific productions in different leading countries (the United States, England, and Australia).

The present descriptive-analytical research has been conducted according to the scientometric approach and using content analysis, co-word analysis, and social network analysis techniques. The research community in the first stage consists of all the scientific productions related to whistle-blowing in the Web of Science from 1970 to 9/30/1399. In the next step, the research community includes scientific productions related to the United States with 562 records, England with 187 records, and Australia with 125 records. HistCite, Bib Excel, Gephi, and SPSS software were used for data analysis purposes and the VOS viewer was used to map the intellectual structure of the study.

The number of 1594 scientific productions on the subject of whistle-blowing in 779 journals by 2382 authors from 72 countries have been indexed and published in the Web of Science database; The findings show the upward and continuous growth of scientific productions in this field that in 2018, the highest number of scientific productions in this field (134 records) was recorded and the mean annual growth rate of whistleblowing scientific productions was found to be 38.13%. Nir J.P. (Indiana University) and Miceli, M. P. (University of Ohio) are ranked first and second in terms of whistleblowing productions and citations, respectively. Indiana University (USA) ranks first in terms of scientific production and citations. The United States, UK and Australia are leading countries in this field. Iran ranks 40th among participating countries with 4 scientific productions. The top scientific fields contributing to this field are business economics with 492, social sciences and other subjects with 290, public law with 260, general internal medicine with 115, and engineering with 99 records. Co-word clustering in the leading countries led to the formation of 8, 6 and 5 clusters, respectively. Among the eight clusters of scientific production of the United States, four clusters whose concepts and vocabulary include "ethics, organization, behavior, countermeasures (retaliation), management, fraud and fraud" since the most frequent and common keywords in whistle-blowing research are in these clusters, so they have a central and important position and are the most important trends of American researchers in this field; Among the six clusters of scientific productions in England, three clusters (yellow, green and purple) include concepts and words with high co-occurrence such as "morality, behavior, retaliation and transparency", since the most frequent and common keywords in whistle-blowing research are in these clusters, so they have a central and important position and are the most important tendencies of English researchers in this field; Among the five clusters of scientific productions in Australia, two clusters (green and red) whose concepts and vocabulary include "ethics, countermeasures, management, financial misconduct and reporting", since the most frequent and common keywords in whistle-blowing research are in these clusters, they have a central and important position, and they are the most important trends of Australian researchers. Whistleblowing has the highest degree of centrality in the scientific productions of leading countries; Keywords: Corruption and fraud, Doping, Innovation, Organizational culture, and whistleblowing have the highest closeness centrality and whistleblowing has the highest betweenness centrality in the leading countries. The United States was found to be the most effective and productive country in the field of whistleblowing.

The dissemination of scientific productions in the field of whistleblowing in the leading countries has an upward trend and is mostly related to the keywords of recent years, although the United States and the United Kingdom are older in scientific productions in this field. Hot topics in the scientific productions of these countries are retaliation, ethics, behavior, information, organization, management, corruption and culture.