Reviewing the Internal Audit Literature in the Public Sector: A Bibliometrics Analysis

Subject and Purpose of the Article: 

The main objective of this research paper is to identify the most frequent and influential topics in the "internal audit in the public sector" literature. We also identify the most influential articles, journals, authors, and countries and provide the co-occurrence network of authors, institutions, and countries.

We applied a bibliometrics approach to assessing 141 research papers on "internal audit in the public sector" from 1993 to 2023 that we obtained from the Scopus database. We did so by using a bibliometric analysis via the R’s bibliometrix package.

Our findings indicate that there is an increasing trend in the number of research studies on the "internal audit in the public sector" line of research. Although we document that concepts such as Corporate Governance, Internal Audit Effectiveness, Internal Controls, Accountability, Audit Committee, and Risk Management are among the most frequent keywords in this line of research that form the conceptual map of this research topic, this line of research is still under-developed and needs to be further researched.

Conclusion, Originality and Its Contribution to the Knowledge:

 We contribute to the existing literature on the "internal audit in the public sector" by providing the conceptual map of prior studies through a bibliometric analysis. We also guide future research on this topic by identifying the underdeveloped areas of research in this line of research