Beyond Numbers: Unravelling the Dimensions of Environmental Accounting through Bibliometric Exploration

ABSTRACT


INTRODUCTION
Over the course of its history, accounting research has undergone a number of notable transformations, including the development of empirical methods and the expansion of quasi-experiments [1]. Research in accounting is a vast field that may be broken down into a number of specialised subfields, one of which is environmental accounting research. Accounting for the environment examines how the effects of economic activities on natural resources and the environment may be measured and accounted for [2]. Environmental accounting research is important because it helps organizations understand the environmental impact of their operations and make informed decisions about resource use and waste reduction. It also helps organizations to comply with environmental regulations and improve their environmental performance [3].
According to the findings of one study, environmental accounting academics have a reasonably significant amount of influence among the authors of the most cited accounting works, despite the fact that the majority of their research is focused on environmental issues published in non-tiertier accounting journals [1], [2]. This suggests that environmental accounting research may need the attention it deserves in the academic community. Other studies have found that adopting environmental management accounting practices can positively impact a company's environmental and financial performance [3]. This highlights the importance of environmental accounting research in helping organizations improve their environmental and financial performance. Research in the discipline of accounting has expanded to encompass a wide variety of subfields, one of which is environmental accounting research. Research in environmental accounting is extremely important because it enables businesses to understand the impact their activities have on the surrounding environment and to make educated choices about the utilisation of resources and the reduction of waste. This research not only helps organisations enhance their environmental performance but also helps them comply with environmental legislation.
The accounting environment plays a vital role in business success. Accounting information systems (AIS) are essential for processing financial transactions and providing relevant decision-making information [4]. Advanced technologies, such as cloud computing and web reporting, have brought significant changes to the accounting and financial environment worldwide [5]. Forensic accounting is another crucial aspect of the accounting environment. This involves applying accounting knowledge and skills to legal matters and is used to detect fraudulent financial reporting [6]. Forensic accounting can help companies detect fraudulent financial statements and prevent financial losses. In today's complex commercial environment, the meaning and use of forensic accounting has become much broader. Forensic accounting is now used to investigate and solve various financial problems, including tax evasion, money laundering, and embezzlement [6]. Management accounting is another critical aspect of the accounting environment. This involves using accounting information to support an organization's decision-making, planning, and control activities [7]. Management accounting systems, such as activity-based costing and the balanced scorecard, can help organizations achieve strategic objectives and improve their financial and non-financial performance [8].
In conclusion, understanding the accounting environment is essential for a business's success. AIS, forensic accounting, and management accounting are critical components of the accounting environment that businesses need to understand and leverage to achieve their goals.
Based on published or perish results, I found several articles related to bibliometric analysis of accounting research. Analyses fraud-related research in the accounting and auditing disciplines from 1926 to 2019 [9]. The findings of this research show that there have been some shifts in the theories, frameworks, and issues that have formed the research field. The authors conclude that developments in the regulatory environment are intimately connected to the progression of fraud research within the accounting and auditing professions. They also demonstrate that the splintered body of literature may be divided up into several groupings, which is characteristic of various other lines of investigation.
Examines the nature and current trends of enterprise risk management (ERM) research using bibliometric analysis [10]. This study found that ERM has been explored in various disciplines, especially business, management, and accounting. The research results also reveal an increasing trend in ERM research associated with crises such as financial outbreaks and pandemics. The authors identify five main themes that best capture the heterogeneous nature of ERM research.
Presented an empirical analysis on the distribution of research in the field of accounting as a subject of various business studies across countries using bibliometric approaches [11]. This data provides more evidence that, between the years 1996 and 2015, there has been a continuing trend towards research specialisation in accounting. The authors also found that the link between accounting and other subfields of business study is undergoing a gradual but discernible transformation.
Overall, these articles provide insight into trends and developments in accounting research using bibliometric analysis. These articles offer helpful information for

Table 1. Some bibliometric analyses that have been done by previous researchers on the topic of Environmental Accounting
Author & Years

Number of Document Analyzed
Sources Finding [12] 814 Emerald The bibliometric analysis discovered trends in EMA research publications that indicated that EMA has progressed as a new discipline, but that the field still confronts hurdles to become more entrenched in mainstream accounting and management research. Even while the number of publications keeps rising, the vast majority of them have been published in journals, books, and reports that are not related to accounting. This is despite the fact that the number of publications continues to increase. In recent years, there has been a trend towards the establishment of specialised publications on environmental accounting (and sustainability), and this trend is still prevalent today. EMA may still be considered a mainstream research area despite the low amount of highly referenced publications produced by certain authors in this field. [13] 503 Our findings imply that there has been a large increase in the number of publications published in this topic during the period that was analysed, indicating interest among academics and the relevance of this issue. Designed and built bibliometric maps, tables, and graphs. Built-in bibliometric maps, tables, and graphs make it possible to visually identify the leading countries (England, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Australia, Germany, Italy, and Spain), scientists working on this issue, the most prolific journals (Journal of Net Production, Sustainability (Switzerland), Management and Sustainability Accounting Journal Journal), as well as key research areas in the near future (sustainability reporting, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability reporting). [14] 38 According to the findings, research on social and environmental reporting in the public sector is likely still in its preliminary phases. The number of current investigations, while progressively increasing, is still quite low and tends to be regional in scope. The majority of the studies examine the reasons why public organisations report, as well as what and how they report; nonetheless, there are a great number of facets that require additional research. Relationships and differences between various types of non-financial reporting, including ICR and IR, are one of the many factors that need to be researched more extensively or require additional validation in order to uncover new paths for future research. This is one of the many aspects that needs to be validated.
The importance of environmental accounting has been underlined by global sustainability challenges and increasing stakeholder expectations.
Governments, Environmental accounting is a set of accounting practices that help companies determine the costs of protecting the environment in the normal course of business, determine the benefits to be derived from those activities, offer the best measurement measure (either in terms of monetary worth or actual physical units), and report your findings [15]. Environmental protection is defined as prevention of environmental impacts, mitigation and/or avoidance, as well as disaster mitigation, and other activities. Environmental impacts are the activities of companies or the burdens placed on the environment by other human activities, as well as potential barriers to protecting the environment [15]. 2012 Economic-Environmental Accounting System.
In general, environmental accounting is an important instrument that may be used to measure the contribution that the natural world makes to human well-being and can also be used to manage natural resources in a sustainable manner [16]. Environmental accounting can help governments, conservation organizations and environmental markets to measure ocean economic activities and increase evidence of ocean sustainability [17]. Additionally, it can be used to measure the eco-efficiency performance of solid waste, as well as to evaluate the efficiency of industrial processes in relation to the best current techniques, or to confirm those procedures [18], [19].

METHOD
The overall research design and reasons for using the exploratory bibliometric methodology. Describe the use of bibliometric analysis as an effective approach to uncovering trends, key contributors, and research gaps in environmental accounting.
Define data sources for bibliometric analysis, such as scientific databases, (Web of Science, Scopus) and relevant journals.
An outline of the various methods of bibliometric analysis that will be implemented, such as the co-citation analysis, the co-authorship analysis, and the keyword analysis. The ways in which these methods will assist in revealing aspects of environmental accounting that go beyond the statistics. VOSviewer and Publish or Perish both make use of many software and technologies.

RESULTS
Using the VosViewer software, by constructing maps based on text data using title and abstract columns, and using the binary counting approach, a total of 3795 terms were obtained in order to address the first goal of this study regarding how articles on the facets of the accounting environment are categorised. This was accomplished by utilising the counting method. With a minimum number of occurrences of a term of 10 times, 133 thresholds were found.
On the other hand, a relevance score will be determined for each of these 133 terms individually. The terms that are the most pertinent to your search will be chosen for you automatically based on this score.
On the basis of this score, the most pertinent phrases will be chosen automatically by default at a percentage of 60%, which will result in the 80 words that are most pertinent. However, the verification procedure must still be carried out by hand, and this involves deleting words that are in no way connected to the topic at hand. These words include editorial, sample, and abstract, amongst others. As a result, there is a maximum of eighty words that can be used into the development of the map.

Figure 1. Network visualization map of keywords
According to Figure 1, there are a number of clusters represented by the colours blue, purple, yellow, red, and green. When looking at all of the articles, certain words in this cluster come up more frequently than others. According to these clusters, there have been a total of five different article categories published up to this point. Table 3 provides more information that may be seen here. Then, to answer how research trends in the accounting environment dimension, we can see the answer from the cluster itself. Figure 2 shows a visualization of the density of articles published by JSE and SEJ. Cluster 1, with the words resources and services being the words that appear most frequently.

Figure 2. Density visualization map of keywords
There is one cluster from the results of this mapping that appears at least in keywords, namely cluster 6. This cluster covers the topic of the dimensions of the accounting environment. From the  researcher's point of view, there are also five clusters, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Network Visualization Map of Authors
Based on Figure 3, it can be seen that the big names from each cluster are marked with big dots in each cluster. In the image, only authors who have links in publications are shown. However, if authorship is deleted, Table. 4. Contemporary environmental accounting: issues, concepts and practice [29] It is clear that the years 1976 through 2023 are the ones in which the documents relating to the accounting environment are expressly quoted the most. This can be seen by looking at the graph. New information is less likely to be acknowledged, with the exception of works written by authors who have already conducted study in the topic and are quite well-known. Then, in order to determine which areas of research have been covered in a greater number of publications, we can look at Table 5.  Table 6 not only describes which themes appear most frequently in publications, but it also reveals the final purpose of this study, which is to explain the future aspects of the accounting environment that create prospects for further research. This is in addition to explaining which topics appear most frequently in publications. Issues that are more particular and lead to implications or measurements from the realm of business and entrepreneurship are opportunities that could be studied more fully.

CONCLUSION
In this study, 990 articles that have topics that are linked to the various aspects of the accounting environment are analysed. Based on the findings of our research, we have determined that there are six distinct categories into which accounting publications can be grouped. The study that is being done on the many aspects of the accounting environment is increasingly focusing on the accounting side of things. There are several topics that frequently appear in publications, such as marketing perspectives from one variable to another. The current study has at least two limitations. Using formal tools (PoP, VOSviewer, and Mendeley software), the subjective judgment of the author is maintained and can still lead to an admission of error. Future studies should use a larger sample size which includes other journals, even if they are not indexed by Scopus. Besides that, This study conducts a bibliometric exploration to uncover dimensions of environmental accounting beyond numbers. By systematically reviewing the literature and

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analyzing bibliometric data, this research has contributed to our understanding of the multidimensional nature of environmental accounting and identified emerging trends, key contributors, and research gaps in the field. The analysis revealed several important findings. First, it is evident that environmental accounting has evolved significantly over the years, with a shift from traditional accounting practices to more comprehensive approaches that consider the environmental impact of business activities. The literature review highlights the development of frameworks, standards and methodologies for integrating environmental factors into accounting practice.
Through bibliometric analysis, influential articles and authors in this field were identified through co-citation and coauthorship analysis. These key contributors have played an important role in shaping the environmental accounting discourse and have made substantial contributions to the field.
Their insights and research have paved the way for the integration of environmental considerations into accounting practice. In addition, analysis of keyword frequency and co-occurrence reveals emerging trends and research groups in environmental accounting. These trends cover topics such as carbon accounting, life cycle assessment, environmental performance measurement and sustainability reporting.
Despite advances in this area, this study also identified several research gaps that require further exploration. These gaps include the need for more interdisciplinary research, the integration of social and economic dimensions into environmental accounting, and the development of standard measurement and reporting frameworks. Addressing this gap will contribute to a more holistic understanding of environmental accounting and facilitate its practical implementation within organizations.