The Scientific Landscape of Internal Audit Research – A Bibliometric Analysis.

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Abstract

Addressing the heavily increased attention on the topic of internal auditing in the post-SOX era, the research conducted aims to ascertain the impact of internal auditing on research and the different scientific sub-areas that define it. The work seeks to extent the existing scant body of literature reviews that has focused on the topic by pursuing an empirical approach. In this context, co-citation analysis is used in combination with social network analysis in order to empirically investigate different existing research fields of internal auditing and to discover the core work that has been done in this area. The scientific landscape of internal auditing can be characterized as profoundly fragmented and deeply rooted into different areas of adjacent accounting research fields. Identified subcategories from which research on internal audit is derived can be summarized as Corporate Governance, Auditor Independence, Auditing Professionalization, Audit Committee Effectiveness, Reliance on Internal Auditing, Internal Control over Financial Reporting, and finally the Regulatory Framework. Additionally, results show that there is an existing pivotal nucleus of research which comprises various topics that focus solely on the internal audit function. The study is limited to the analysis of major accounting journals namely The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting Economics and Accounting, Organizations and Society and is restricted onto the years between 1926 and 2016.

Authors

• Joel Behrend, University of Duisburg-Essen

• Marc Eulerich, University Duisburg-Essen