Corporate Governance and Financial Fraud in ASEAN: A Bibliometric Roadmap for Future Research

Corporate governance and financial statement fraud have increasingly attracted scholarly and regulatory attention in the ASEAN region. This focus aligns with more frequent accounting manipulation and rising demands for transparency. Although literature on this topic is expanding, comprehensive quantitative reviews remain scarce. This study aims to present an updated mapping of the literature on corporate governance and financial statement fraud. It compiles 269 articles published between 2005 and 2024 from the Scopus database. This study employs bibliometric methods, including VOSviewer and the R-Bibliometrix (Biblioshiny) package, to examine productivity, collaboration networks, citation analysis, co-citation analysis, and thematic evolution. The findings identify leading journals, authors, universities, and countries, with Malaysia and Indonesia as dominant contributors. Thematic analysis highlights earnings management as the key issue linking various research streams. Governance mechanisms such as audit committees, audit quality, and ownership structures follow. This study maps the intellectual structure of the literature using co-citation networks and outlines future research directions through thematic maps and the evolution of keywords. It offers the most recent synthesis of the literature, fills gaps in previous reviews, and points to a forward-looking agenda. The agenda encourages the exploration of other ASEAN contexts, the integration of non-traditional issues such as sustainability, and increased cross-country collaborations.