ANALYSIS OF SCIENTIFIC PRODUCTION ABOUT AS INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC SECTOR ACCOUNTING STANDARDS IN NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL JOURNALSIPSAS, governamental accounting, systematic review, bibliometrics, VOSviewer.
The general objective of this research was to analyze the characteristics of the scientific production concerning the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) in national and international journals, through a systematic review of the literature, from a critical and bibliometric approach, under a time frame that comprised the years 2003 to 2022. In a first stage, the bibliometric networks referring to a sample of 226 articles, collected from the Scopus database, were analyzed based on indicators of coauthorship, co-occurrence, direct citation, cocitation and bibliographic coupling, measured using the VOSviewer software. From the results, it was evident the distribution of publications among the following thematic axes: (i) IPSAS antecedents, implementation and results; (ii) European Public Sector Accounting Standards; (iii) accrual accounting; (iv) Institutional Theory; (v) measurement and recognition in the public sector; (vi) country overviews; and, (vii) Brazilian studies. Of the thematic axes outlined, 93 articles were selected, which, after categorizing in terms of conceptual orientation, research method, country investigated and level of government, revealed that: 37.63% of the analyzed publications did not make use of a theoretical foundation, while 27.95% and 17.20% made use of the Institutional Theory framework and the New Public Management (NPM) approach, respectively; a large part of the research employed an empirical approach and document analysis techniques in their methods; and, most studies investigated a multiplicity of countries, from the perspective of the central government level. Moreover, from the complete reading of the 93 cited articles, it was observed the recurrence of issues related to the isomorphic pressures of coercive nature exerted by multilateral organizations and the recurrence of works that highlighted the heterogeneous processes of IPSAS implementation. Finally, considering the inherent limitations of the database and given the breadth of the investigated theme, it is suggested for future research: the comparison between samples belonging to more than one database and the analysis, individually, of the bibliometric networks related to each of the identified thematic axes.