Abstract:

This paper provides information about trends in management accounting research. Accounting scientific research has been increasing exponentially over the last years. Some terms are already over-researched, yet, there are new and interesting subjects currently in the goal of the researchers all over the world. To identify both the most published terms and the new trends in management accounting (MA) scientific publishing is the main contribution of the paper.

Financial accounting is mainly designed for external users, as state institutions, banks, suppliers or customers. As managers request more detailed information about important internal terms, as the production process, the labor productivity or activity reports, the role of MA is to provide that information.

MA first goals were related to operational cost-management terms. Currently, it is part of the strategic management process. This evolution took time. It was not of the managers' initiative, but instead consultant’s initiative who introduced the concepts based on the research by academics. Although non-mandatory in the normative sense, it is a valuable framework in the current decision making in a company.

In this study, management accounting is the subject in research, as it is an important tool in companies accounting information system. Current research often is available in digital libraries. This fact allows new researches to better contribute to science, once they can stand on previous literature findings.

This paper consists of a bibliometric study on both traditional and current terms of MA scientific publications. The research question is to characterize the evolution of MA research. It has three main objectives: to analyze the evolution of the scientific literature published in MA, to identify the most published MA terms, and to identify current trends in the MA published research.

The study describes the evolutional research studies available in three digital libraries specialized in scientific research, from 1951 to 2015, and compares its results. Thirty-four main terms on MA global system were searched in Google Scholar, B-On, and Science Direct, to identify both the most returned and the newest ones.

The main results show that early-stage research terms like “costs”, “budgets” and “performance evaluations” are the most returned items. The newest terms depend on the library: in Google Scholar and Science Direct the newest term is “global MA principles”, but in B-On, the newest term is “accounting analytical systems”.

Keywords:

Accounting research, B-On, Bibliometric study, Digital libraries, Google Scholar, Management accounting, Management accounting research, Science Direct.