Half a century of public sector accounting research through bibliometric analysis: Looking back to move forward

This literature review aims to highlight the themes and the developments of Public Sector Accounting (PSA) research over the last five decades (1970–2019), analysing 2,187 papers though a combination of bibliometric (co-word) analysis and qualitative insights into the selected papers. The review shows that PSA scholarship has grown in significance over the last few decades giving rise to a vibrant and variegated scientific community, flourishing at the intersection among, but also increasingly spanning across, different disciplines. Moreover, it reveals that traditional themes such as budgeting, performance measurement and accountability remained at the core of the literature across most of the decades, attracting attention from multiple communities and journals. Other themes, such as accruals accounting, accounting standards, reporting and auditing experienced varied interest over the decades, and reflected the interests of more specialized, or ‘niche’ communities of scholarship. By looking at the trends of PSA over time, the paper shows how accounting systems and calculative practices have come to reflect and affect the multiple values and the need for quantifying techniques of an ever-evolving public sector. A call for more attention towards accounting for multiple and plural values is advanced, with suggestions for future research avenues.