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This paper undertakes an extensive and systematic review of the literature on earnings management (EM) over the past three decades (1992–2022). Furthermore, the study identifies emerging research themes and proposes future avenues for further investigation in the realm of EM.

For this study, a comprehensive collection of 2,775 articles on EM published between 1992 and 2022 was extracted from the Scopus database. The author employed various tools, including Microsoft Excel, R studio, Gephi and visualization of similarities viewer, to conduct bibliometric, content, thematic and cluster analyses. Additionally, the study examined the literature across three distinct periods: prior to the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (1992–2001), subsequent to the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002–2012), and after the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (2013–2022) to draw more inferences and insights on EM research.

The study identifies three major themes, namely the operationalization of EM constructs, the trade-off between EM tools (accrual EM, real EM and classification shifting) and the role of corporate governance in mitigating EM in emerging markets. Existing literature in these areas presents mixed and inconclusive findings, suggesting the need for further theoretical development. Further, the study findings observe a shift in research focus over time: initially, understanding manipulation techniques, then evaluating regulatory measures, and more recently, investigating the impact of global accounting standards. Several emerging research themes (technology advancements, cross-cultural and cross-national studies, sustainability, behavioral aspects and non-financial indicators of EM) have been identified. This study subsequent analysis reveals an evolving EM landscape, with researchers from disciplines like data science, computer science and engineering applying their analytical expertise to detect EM anomalies. Furthermore, this study offers significant insights into sophisticated EM techniques such as neural networks, machine learning techniques and hidden Markov models, among others, as well as relevant theories including dynamic capabilities theory, learning curve theory, psychological contract theory and normative institutional theory. These techniques and theories demonstrate the need for further advancement in the field of EM. Lastly, the findings shed light on prominent EM journals, authors and countries.

This study conducts quantitative bibliometric and thematic analyses of the existing literature on EM while identifying areas that require further development to advance EM research.

Prior research (e.g Holthausen and Leftwich, 1986) has found that firms’ stock prices react negatively to announcements of downgrades of their bond ratings. Our study examines whether stock prices react negatively to downgrades because the rating agency conveys adverse private information about the firm through the downgrade (the information provision hypothesis) and/or because the downgrade imposes significant costs on the firm (the cost imposition hypothesis). The results of a cross‐sectional model support both hypotheses. Specifically, we find that firms’ stock returns are positively related with their institutional stockholdings and negatively related with their debt‐to‐equity ratios. This suggests that the rating agency is an important information provider for firms with low institutional stockholdings, and that the downgrades significantly impact firms’ borrowing costs.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

The purpose of this paper is to present a bibliometric analysis of earnings management (EM), providing an overview of the main results and research trends in this area. EM is a relevant topic in financial studies. It has been widely studied over the past few decades as a phenomenon of intentional manipulation of financial reporting.

The Web of Science (WoS) database was used as a source, and this study has adopted VOSviewer as the bibliometric analysis tool to achieve an overview of EM research and understand current research trends on this matter. This study has collected data from 4,342 articles published from 1900 to 2020.

The conclusions of this study show that EM is strongly related to corporate governance, performance and quality of information. Publication trends and categories are useful to understand the development of trends and current domains in this area. This research analyses the most productive authors, countries and journals. This study conducted a cluster analysis using a keyword perspective to obtain emerging trends in EM. Research in EM through real activities represents a research gap, which can be an opportunity for future research.

The authors recognize as limitations the fact that the study is limited to the WoS database. Another limitation is the keywords used for the search, as this study only uses “earnings management”, as it is the most used keyword in EM literature. An additional limitation is associated with the selection of only one type of document, “articles,” disregarding other types of publications.

Although there are some bibliometric studies on EM, this study found out that they focus on specific EM topics and fail to analyze this theme on a global scale. Most of the literature on this subject is disperse and consequently needs systematization. This research is also relevant for academic purpose, as this research contributes to understanding the state of art and contributes to the development of scientific knowledge by providing a systematization of the literature on the topic of EM.

The purpose of this paper is to propose the use of a user-centric service map to facilitate the visual exploration and monitoring of user context information for proactive market analysis.

The paper supports a context-based market analysis by developing a user-centric service map which comprehensively visualizes a variety of contexts, users, and services. Empirical data were gathered from service descriptions and reviews of 100 mobile application services in the Apple App Store’s lifestyle and healthcare and fitness categories.

The user-centric service map supports the analysis of the context information from using various mobile app services, and can therefore be effectively applied for market-segment analysis and user-value analysis.

The user-centric service map involves implications in terms of multi-disciplinary proactive market orientation and data-driven strategy development, allowing firms to respond to changing market conditions in the mobile business promptly and even preemptively.

The initiative uncovering of latent needs through examining context of use have been an important focus of prior work, but little attempt has been presented in the way of frameworks for converting abundant context data into strategic information. The paper provides new methods and procedures to establish and interpret service maps using flexible visual features.

A complete form of knowledge management system comprises both process management and contents management. Process management is concerned with handling activities to generate and utilize knowledge, whereas contents management deals with knowledge contents themselves. Workflow, considered as a core component of process management, is to define and administer business processes automatically. A knowledge map is a representation tool to visualize knowledge sources and relationships among knowledge artifacts. Noting the crucial needs to integrate process management and contents management and recognizing that previous research has paid little attention to this issue, we propose a framework for developing a workflow‐based knowledge map. The proposed process‐perspective knowledge map takes the structure of processes and tasks defined in workflow into account. We then materialize the framework by developing a prototype and applying it to the car seat design process of the automobile industry. The integration represents an exploratory effort to combine process management and contents management.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the literature around regulatory compliance and market manipulation in capital markets through the use of bibliometrics and propose future research directions. Under the domain of capital markets, this theme is a niche area of research where greater academic investigations are required. Most of the research is fragmented and limited to a few conventional aspects only. To address this gap, this study engages in a large-scale systematic literature review approach to collect and analyze the research corpus in the post-2000 era.

The big data corpus comprising research articles has been extracted from the scientific Scopus database and analyzed using the VoSviewer application. The literature around the subject has been presented using bibliometrics to give useful insights on the most popular research work and articles, top contributing journals, authors, institutions and countries leading to identification of gaps and potential research areas.

Based on the review, this study concludes that, even in an era of global market integration and disruptive technological advancements, many important aspects of this subject remain significantly underexplored. Over the past two decades, research has lagged behind the evolution of capital market crime and market regulations. Finally, based on the findings, the study suggests important future research directions as well as a few research questions. This includes market manipulation, market regulations and new-age technologies, all of which could be very useful to researchers in this field and generate key inputs for stock market regulators.

The limitation of this research is that it is based on Scopus database so the possibility of omission of some literature cannot be completely ruled out. More advanced machine learning techniques could be applied to decode the finer aspects of the studies undertaken so far.

Increased integration among global markets, fast-paced technological disruptions and complexity of financial crimes in stock markets have put immense pressure on market regulators. As economies and equity markets evolve, good research investigations can aid in a better understanding of market manipulation and regulatory compliance. The proposed research directions will be very useful to researchers in this field as well as generate key inputs for stock market regulators to deal with market misbehavior.

This study has adopted a period-wise broad-based scientific approach to identify some of the most pertinent gaps in the subject and has proposed practical areas of study to strengthen the literature in the said field.

To solve the trade‐offs between marketing and R&D domains and to minimize information loss in new product development (NPD), this study proposes an integrated design process as a new solution to the interface system between the two domains.

House of Quality integrated with multivariate statistical analysis is used for determining important design features. These design features are used as parameters for conjoint analysis and Taguchi method, and then the results of analyses are compared. Sequential application of conjoint analysis and Taguchi method, depending on the differences in utilities and signal to noise ratios, is applied for the integrated design process. An automotive interior design is illustrated for the validation of the integrated design process.

The integrated design process determines a point of compromise between the optimums of conjoint analysis and Taguchi method. Sequential application of two methods ensures full utilization of both methods and no loss of information.

More illustrations on NPD are needed to verify the proposed process.

The design process suggested in this study can be used for process innovation in six sigma approach and be integrated with value chain intelligently. This study proposes the strategic guideline of the integrated design process for enterprises.

The integrated design process suggests the solution for the trade‐offs between marketing domain that pursues the utility of product and R&D domain that emphasizes robustness of product quality. This integrated design process will give enterprises competitive advantages in NPD.