Integrated Reporting as an Academic Research Concept in the Area of Business

Abstract

Recent financial scandals and the global financial crisis have generated numerous criticisms of the value and use of annual financial and sustainability reports prepared by companies. This has generated the elaboration and use of a new model of corporate-information reporting that considers strategic, social, economic, and environmental aspects. This study synthesizes the knowledge of the use of integrated reporting as a source of information, and bibliometrically analyzes of 268 articles published in the Web of Science database in 2011–2019. Results show that 77.6% of the academic articles were from developed countries, and the five most influential countries are Italy, South Africa, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Results show that the development of this type of research is scarce in emerging economies. The most influential authors are García, Rodríguez, and De Villiers. A high level of interconnections is observed in used keywords, of which the most used are ‘sustainability’ and ‘management’. Lastly, this article contributes to the international discussion on integrated reporting by carrying out a structured review of the literature, highlighting previous research.

Why Integrated Reporting? Insights from Early Adoption in an Emerging Economy

“…The IR has become a strong global trend with strong global growth since the year 2011 [11] and thus, this phenomenon is already present in a large part of the world, including emerging markets, such as that in Chile.…”

“…In accordance with this, integrated reporting (IR) aims to inform the potential of the company to create value in the short and long term through a strategic vision of the entity [9,10], and has, starting from the year 2011, been transformed into an innovative information tool for interest groups [11].…”

The Role of Integrated Reporting in Emerging Market: Earnings Quality and Debt Maturity

“…The preparers of the company's financial statements stated that they could see the benefits of IR, but they were reluctant to implement it. These barriers may be due to factors such as the level of stakeholder demand for IRs that are still lacking, the availability of professional accountants who understand the concept of IR, and cultural and regulatory support that is not yet available (Navarrete-Oyarce et al, 2021).…”

Towards concise reporting through integrated reporting: a bibliometric review

“…Existing studies limited their analysis to content analysis, e.g. structured literature review using the Web of Science (WoS) database from 1975 to 2019 (Navarrete-Oyarce et al, 2021), systematic literature review (SLR) involving 110 articles in IR (Soriya and Rastogi, 2022) and review (Di Vaio et al, 2020). Moreover, Lopes and Penela (2021) used WoS and Scopus in their study, leading to a significant difference in the present work from the previous ones for several reasons.…”