Abstract:

Financial reports prepared by enterprises are the fundamental and most important data source for business stakeholders. Auditing scandals in many countries around the globe have broken the trust of stakeholders using the financial information of enterprises in these reports. Enterprises intervene in the financial reporting process in their favor through many different methods, which offers stakeholders misinformation about their financial status and performance. Over the past few years, many academicians from different countries have tried to develop formulas and models in order to evaluate whether manipulations are made in the financial statements, and if so, how much and in which accounts. As such models are developed by taking the market conditions of a country into account, each model may not produce the same results in every country. Tests and evaluations by academicians and researchers of each country on whether the existing models are suitable for the country's market conditions and the financial reports of the companies in the market, and if necessary, changes in the model or development of new models will help stakeholders to make more accurate decisions about the companies. The aim of the study is to evaluate the national theses on manipulation types and manipulation models published so far in the thesis center of the Council of Higher Education (YÖK) via the bibliometric analysis technique, and to determine, in terms of different variables, to what extent these topics have been studied in postgraduate theses in Turkey. Such theses were downloaded from the thesis center and evaluated by transforming them into quantitative data in terms of university, department, title of advisor, type of thesis, year of publication, language and number of citations. It has been observed that the theses published in Turkey on manipulation methods and models have mostly been published in the Department of Business Administration and almost all of them are in Turkish. It has been determined that Marmara University is the university with the highest number of theses, the most commonly studied manipulation type is "profit management", and "Beneish" is the most commonly tested manipulation model. The study has also exhibited that the most popular topic for doctoral theses has been the profit management and the highest number of citations have been made to the theses on this topic. Regarding the topics examined in this research, it has been revealed that only forty-eight universities have students write thesis on these topics and the most theses have been completed in 2019.

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