Twenty-One Years of the Behavioral Accounting Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

We intended to provide a comprehensive overview of behavioral accounting research. For this purpose, 371 articles published in two specialized journals of behavioral accounting - "Behavioral Research in Accounting" and "Advances in Accounting Behavioral Research"- have been analyzed. These journals are indexed on the Scopus database and are among the specialist journals ranked by the Australian Business Deans Council. Co-word analysis and social network analysis have been used as the main method. Our analysis shows that emerging issues in recent years in the field of behavioral research have focused on "auditing", "corporate governance", "fraud" and "ethics". Findings show that the article "Online instrument delivery and participant recruitment services: Emerging opportunities for behavioral accounting research" with 167 citations is the most cited behavioral research article. Wicky Arnold is the top author in terms of number of articles with 12 articles. The United States is the top country in the world with 179 articles and 2,210 citations, and the two top universities in the world with 15 articles are the Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Central Florida. This paper is the first study that conduct a bibliometric analysis of behavioral accounting research focusing on two specialized journals of behavioral accounting.