Joint Determinants of Audit Fees and Audit Delay: PublicationTrends, Thematic Structures and Intellectual Networks

The current paper is a bibliometric review of audit fees and audit delay research published from 1992 to 2025. The ‎analysis was performed using publication trends, thematic structures, and intellectual networks. Additionally, ‎Biblioshiny and VOSviewer were used on 508 articles in the Scopus database. The results showed a significant ‎increase in publications in 2021-2023, reflecting an increased academic interest in catching up with emerging issues, ‎i.e., cybersecurity threats, the risk of COVID-19, the application of iXBRL, the intensity of regulations, and supply ‎chain dynamics related to their consequences in terms of audit price and audit timeliness. Thematic mapping was ‎applied to identify five general research clusters: audit risk and timeliness; audit quality and independence; corporate ‎governance and reporting; market and contextual variables; and gender and diversity in audit governance. In the ‎meantime, the citation and co-authorship analyses determined the most influential authors and journals in the ‎discipline. Even though 2006-2015 can be defined as a time interval that is characterized by consistent scholarly effect, ‎the average number of citations decreases after 2016, indicating that the field has become more mature and moved to ‎such up-to-date issues as audit technology, data analytics, and sustainability assurance.