Research trends in going concern assessment and financial distress in last two decades : a bibliometric analysis

Over time, companies have faced many crises that have impacted their capacity to remain operational in the market. When going through periods of financial distress, companies must find solutions to face the risks and to fulfill the going concern assumption, which is an essential principle in accounting and also of major importance in financial-statements auditing. The research objective is to identify the research trends and approaches in the fields of going concern and financial distress. To achieve this purpose, a bibliometric analysis was carried out of the articles published in the journals indexed in Web of Science Clarivate Analytics (WoS) for the period 2004-2023. The selection criteria was based on instances of the keywords "going concern" and "financial distress" appearing in a sample of 2.859 articles. The results highlighted that these fields represent a domain of interest in the research, with the trend being most pronounced in the area of financial distress, since 2018. Based on the content analysis of the most influential articles, the main topics addressed were related to audit quality and aspects related to management and corporate governance. Thus, it is confirmed that the area of financial distress and going concern assessment is a widely studied one, and the studies made can provide essential information to overcome the difficult periods that a company can go through.