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Digitalization and financial statements audit: future research directions and bibliographic mapping.
Financial statements audit is a necessary element of the market economy and the expansion of economic ties on trusting relationships. An important dimension of this process is the extension and generalization of the financial model of responsibility to the relationship between business and society, where the "new public administration" is embodied, creatingpublic responsibility regarding the concepts of mission and business goals, efficient use of resources, financial performance, and competition. One of the latest trends in this field is the use of digital technologies. Statistical methods of data analysis, machine learning, artificial intelligence began to be used by auditing companies only since 2017. Improving the methodological and practical base in the field of digital solutions for an audit can significantly reduce the time and transaction costs of audit activities. Such methods are applicable to identify risks, reliability of the information, the veracity of reporting, time frames for project implementation. At the moment, there are no publications in scientific databases with an integrated scientometric approach to identify the most significant, applicable, and promising research areas in the field of financial statements audit. Analysis of modern literature using innovative methods and software products allows us to highlight areas of audit science that will have mainstream interest to researchers and companies.
The introduction and use of digital technologies contribute to the optimization of the auditor's work, simplifying analytical procedures, and analysis of information arrays. It is important to emphasize that when using new technologies in auditing, the professional judgment and skills of the auditor remain paramount.
The empirical basis for the study was the bibliographic information system Web of Science Core collection due to the representative sample of works devoted to a digitalization of financial statements audit. What are the main development vectors of research in the field of financial statements auditing? Analysis of bibliometric information and building a bibliometric-based map allowed determining the mainstream ways of development of the auditing field and the future research directions.