Tax Avoidance and Corporate Governance: Mapping the Intellectual Structure, Emerging Trends, and Future Research Frontiers

In spite of a considerable amount of attention being paid to the interaction between tax avoidance and corporate governance across the globe, this study aims to provide a detailed bibliometric evaluation concerning the productivity, performance, and intellectual structure of scientific production on tax avoidance and corporate governance. All data used in this study were gathered from the Scopus database using documents published from 2006 to 2025, which made the total number of documents reach 295. In this study, both VOSviewer and Biblioshiny were used to conduct a bibliometric analysis of this corpus. The findings of this research revealed a remarkable annual increase in publication rate equal to 25.77%, showing an increasing trend in academic research concerning the role of corporate governance in shaping corporate tax avoidance behavior. The most productive journals that have been identified as the main sources are Accounting and Finance, Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of risk and financial management and Cogent Business and Management. Moreover, Richardson G. and Taylor G. have been found to be the most productive authors in terms of the number of documents published in this field, whereas China, Indonesia, and the USA are the leading countries in terms of the number of affiliated documents. There are seven major clusters discovered based on co-occurrence analysis, among which corporate governance and tax avoidance emerge as the most powerful driving forces. The trending-topics analysis further highlighted that board-gender diversity, CEO compensation and agency problems are the keywords emerging most recently in the field.