From Rhetoric to Reform: A Bibliometric Review on the Usefulness of Supreme Audit Institutions’ Recommendations and Rituals of Verification

While Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) are established to promote accountability and enhance public sector performance, the practical utility of their recommendations remains contested. Drawing from competing perspectives in the literature, this study investigates whether audit recommendations meaningfully influence institutional reform or serve as ritualistic formalities within bureaucratic environments. Through a systematic bibliometric review covering 1997–2024, guided by the PRISMA framework and implemented using VOSviewer, this study analyzes 209 peer-reviewed articles from the Dimensions database to map co-authorship patterns, country collaborations, and co-citation networks. The results reveal four temporal co-authorship clusters, indicating a transition from early technocratic discourse to reformist and interdisciplinary engagement. Country-level co-authorship analysis highlights epistemic asymmetries, with the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States acting as knowledge brokers, while emerging actors from Asia and the MENA region suggest a shift toward South-South and hybrid collaboration models. Co-citation analysis unveils three dominant knowledge paradigms: (1) critical-institutional theory emphasizing symbolic legitimacy and ritualism, (2) empirical mainstream accounting research focused on audit effectiveness, and (3) agency, based governance scholarship linking audit utility to organizational performance and trust. The findings underscore a growing but fragmented scholarly interest in audit recommendation uptake. Despite conceptual advances, the persistent questionable usefulness of audit recommendations, especially in developing contexts, suggests that symbolic compliance, political inertia, and structural audit weaknesses remain barriers to reform. This study contributes to the literature by illuminating both the intellectual architecture and the reform challenges surrounding the use of audit recommendations, while calling for a multi-level, context-sensitive research agenda that bridges theory, practice, and governance realities.