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The purpose of this paper is to present a method for a structured literature review (SLR). An SLR is a method for examining a corpus of scholarly literature, to develop insights, critical reflections, future research paths and research questions. SLRs are common in scientific disciplines dominated by quantitative approaches, but they can be adapted in accounting studies since quantitative and qualitative approaches are commonly accepted.

A literature review, as a piece of academic writing, must have a logical, planned structure. The authors also argue it requires tests based on qualitative and quantitative methods. Therefore, the authors describe ten steps for developing an SLR.

The SLR method is a way that scholars can stand “on the shoulders of giants” and provide insightful and impactful research that is different to the traditional authorship approaches to literature reviews.

Traditional literature reviews can have varied results because of a lack of rigour. SLRs use a process that, through a set of rules, potentially offers less bias and more transparency of the execution and measures and techniques of validation and reliability.

SLRs provide an approach that can help academics to discover under-investigated topics and methods, nurturing, therefore, the development of new knowledge areas and research approaches.

The paper presents accounting researchers with an opportunity to develop insightful and publishable studies, and also serves as a basis for developing future research agendas in the accounting field. The authors advocate the SLR method especially to higher degree research students and emerging scholars as a way of potentially developing robust and defensible research agendas and questions.

This study offers a structured literature review (SLR) on female digital entrepreneurship (DE). This is done by providing insights into the recent developments of the topic, reviewing and critiquing previous studies in the literature, and pinpointing areas for future potential studies.

A comprehensive SLR was conducted on 18 papers published between 2017 and 2022 by discipline, time, methodologies, context, topic, and theoretical emphasis. The authors employed the three phases of critical research – insight, critique, and transformative redefinition – to conduct the literature review.

The literature on female DE is inadequate, fragmented, and divergent in terms of less practice-based insights. Furthermore, most female DE research is published in nonspecialized journals. The examination of the impact of gender and cross-country comparative studies is scarce. Existing literature lacks epistemological and methodological diversity. The lack of theoretical connections across the various research areas on female entrepreneurship may be the reason why this area of study has proven difficult for scholars. Few authors exhibit high specialization in the topic, whereas most authors contribute to either DE or female entrepreneurship.

This SLR research aims to provide an overview of the female DE field by identifying the current trend of research and recognizing future research directions and to improve readers’ knowledge of this research branch.

This review has classified the field's main topics and found that the influence of context (institutional and social) is the most investigated issue. Further, it presents a potential for practitioners' contribution to the field as coauthors and outlines needed studies.

This study provides a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary, updated review and research agenda that supplements rather than substitutes the existing literature reviews on female entrepreneurship. Moreover, this study makes a significant contribution by presenting the stages of development in female DE research within the context of the overall literature on female entrepreneurship.

Research dealing with non-financial reporting formats in public sector organizations is progressively expanding. This paper systematizes the existing literature with the aim of understanding how research is developing and identifying the gaps in need of further investigation.

A structured literature review was conducted by rigorously following the steps defined in previous studies. The structured nature of the literature review paves the way for a solid understanding and critical analysis of the state of the art of research on non-financial reporting formats in public sector organizations.

The critical analysis of the literature shows that most existing studies have focused on sustainability reporting in higher education institutions, local governments and state-owned enterprises, while remaining silent on the healthcare sector. Additional theoretical and empirical approaches should feed future research. Several areas deserve further investigations that might impactfully affect public sector organizations, standard setters, practitioners and scholars.

This paper offers a comprehensive review of the literature on different reporting formats that public sector organizations adopt to report various dimensions of their performance to both internal and external stakeholders. The structured literature review enables the identification of future directions for the literature in this field.

The author discusses his views on writing good, structured literature reviews (SLRs), meta-analyses and bibliometric articles with the aim of encouraging the audience to engage with this research approach.

The author adopts a descriptive approach for sharing his views.

The author provides some examples where SLRs might be useful.

Although conducting SLRs is quite laborious, the eventual publication is highly rewarding both in terms of relatively high citation counts and of offering many early career researchers with a handy scholarly resource for initiating new research.

In the past decade, intellectual capital (IC) measurement and reporting have been feeding scientific debate; however, only few studies address these issues together. The present research aims to provide an integrated view of the topics covered by the existing literature and to highlight the emerging research trends and set the agenda for future research.

This study develops a structured literature review (SLR) of the extant research concerned with IC measurement and reporting, using a comprehensive sample of 1,021 articles extracted from the Scopus database.

The findings of the SLR show that the existing literature focuses on seven research areas: IC and public sector; IC university and education; IC evaluation method; internal and external IC disclosure; IC and CSR; management of IC in organizations; other. Overall, findings indicate that IC measurement and reporting are highly researched topics that continue to attract the interests of scholars. Finally, the SLR analysis has allowed outlining a future research agenda, with particular reference to the IC evaluation method and internal and external IC disclosure research areas.

The main limitation of this research lies in the manual screening of relevant studies, which entails some degree of subjectivity. Furthermore, another limitation research could be considered the use of a single database (Scopus).

The present study brings potential contributions for scholars and practitioners. From a scholarly perspective, the paper provides a systematization of scientific contributions that have dealt with IC measurement and reporting. In particular, it contributes to the scholarly debate bringing into focus various IC measurement and reporting issues in the landscape of private and public organizations. Referring to practical implications, our research supports the strategic use of IC measurement and reporting as a key lever for improving the management of firms. Using an analytical framework that combines insights from the agency, stakeholder and legitimacy theories, this study highlights that IC reporting activity should be used strategically as a means to engage with all firm's stakeholders, in particular with a view to reducing information asymmetry and improving firm reputation.

The purpose of the paper is to perform a review and analyze the literature on lean accounting (LA) to develop insights into how LA research is developing, offering a critique of the research to date and underlining future research opportunities.

The research uses a structured literature review (SLR) to categorize and analyze 39 research articles from relevant journals with a publication date from 1996 to 2020 (September) and to answer three research questions.

Findings demonstrated that although LA seems to be the most suitable method for lean companies, it still lacks research in terms of the role of accountants in lean organizations as well as how its concepts are integrated with the generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP).

The paper provides both academics and practitioners with valuable insights regarding the role of management accounting and accountants in the pursuit of lean transformation, presenting meaningful themes and a complete analysis of the literature along with research gaps for future research.

The paper contributes to lean manufacturing literature by providing a comprehensive SLR of articles regarding LA. Also, the paper serves as a basis for developing future research agendas in management accounting practices for lean organizations.

The purpose of this study is to understand and analyze the key topics on which scholars have engaged in relation to crowdfunding and its starring role in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries from an Islamic perspective. A Structured Literature Review (SLR) is used in this study to assess how scholars carried out their studies in order to better understand future research directions.

The study adopted a SLR methodology and considered 89 peer-reviewed studies published between 1981 and 2021 in GCC countries.

The study identified the starring role of crowdfunding from the Islamic perspective, its role in economic development and its role as a source of finance for new business startups in GCC countries.

Because the research was conducted by a single person, his subjective interpretation might have an impact on the results. Furthermore, only journal papers limited to GCC and published between 1981 and 2021 were examined.

Countries in GCC might recognize the starring role of crowdfunding for their SMEs and economic development.

The authors draw avenues for future research by considering the starring role of crowdfunding using SLR from the Islamic perspective. This helps future researchers to identify the starring role of crowdfunding to contextualize in GCC countries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role and impact of accounting within the fragmented field of public value theory literature.

The work develops a structured literature review (SLR) and seeks to shed light on the state of public value research, with particular emphasis on the role of accounting scholarship.

The lack of empirical research and the limited number of accounting papers reveal how accounting scholars need to achieve a deeper understanding of the public value conceptualization, creation and measurement process.

The paper develops the first wide-ranging SLR on public value accounting. It is a starting point to develop new research avenues, both in the fields of accountability/external reporting, and management accounting and performance management.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework emerged as a guidepost for the transition to sustainable development. To achieve this transition, companies are encouraged to integrate these goals into their business strategies, processes and corporate reporting cycle. The purpose of this paper is to review and critique the corporate SDGs reporting literature, develop insights into the state of this research field and identify a future research agenda.

Using a structured literature review (SLR) methodology, the paper reviews 65 empirical papers published in this field to identify how the current research is developing, offers a critique and identifies future research avenues to advance this field.

Corporate SDGs reporting is developing as a research area of great importance. The findings reveal that current SDGs reporting literature lacks theorisation, overly focusses on publicly listed companies and succinctly describes organisations’ engagement with the SDGs as superficial. Surprisingly, regions such as North America, the UK and other emerging economies have received less attention from scholars. Further, only a few authors have specialised in this field, and there currently exists low levels of international collaborations among authors as well as practitioners.

The paper provides a novel contribution to the emerging field of corporate SDGs reporting. The key theoretical implications from this study’s SLR include the need for more interventionist research. Although there is an increasing number of accounting scholars developing research within this field, the prevailing research is concentrated on corporate SDGs engagement, drivers of SDGs reporting and scope of SDGs reporting. Furthermore, the scientific discourse remains largely under-theorised with positivist framings primarily focussed on the “what” questions. Thus, a modification to the current approaches and research methods is necessary to advance this field further.

The study provides practitioners with valuable insights into the current state of corporate reporting on the SDGs. To achieve more substantive engagement and reporting, a deeper understanding of the factors that influence corporate behaviour and disclosure practices is necessary. In particular, the study identifies new opportunities for practitioners to enhance the value relevance of corporate SDGs reporting.

The paper offers a comprehensive structured review of the empirical papers published on corporate SDGs reporting. It contributes to deepening this nascent research field by identifying five distinct areas where accounting and business scholars may focus to advance the field further and contribute to achieving the SDGs agenda.

The purpose of this research is to review literature about the performance assessment (PA) in urban fire departments (FDs) to gain state-of-the-art of the fire departments' performance assessment (FDPA) and identify its most applied methods and indicators.

A five-stage structured literature review (SLR) is conducted to review the FDPA-related studies; then, the statistical analysis is applied to reveal more information from the extracted data and design a general framework for FDPA.

The systematic literature review resulted in 336 independent variables for FDPA and finding the data envelopment analysis (DEA) as the most applied FDPA method among the mathematical and statistical models in the reviewed papers. By using analysis outcomes, a general conceptual framework for FDPA is proposed.

The reviewed studies were limited to assessments at the strategic level and urban fire protection services.

The results of this research can support fire protection service managers, decision-makers, PA researchers and academicians to have a better understanding of FDPA and state-of-the-art in this field.

A considerable number of studies have been done about the FDPA to provide methods to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of FDs. Although there are reviews about PA in fire service areas, to the best of our knowledge, no study has been done about FDPA.