Examining the Trend of the Research on eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL): A Bibliometric Review

XBRL or eXtensible Business Reporting Language is a digital version of business reports that have been widely used in order to replace the traditional paper-based reports such as PDF and HTML. Reports in XBRL format opens up various capabilities where the users of the reports can use, share, analyse or add meaningful value to the data. Based on the usefulness and benefits of XBRL, there are many kinds of research has been conducted on this topic. Therefore, this paper aims to analyse, and reports published documents related to XBRL based on the data obtained from the Scopus database. As of 15th July 2019, a total of 370 documents is retrieved and analysed. Using standard bibliometric indicators, this article reports the research productivity, documents and source types, language of publications, subject area, most active source title, distribution of publications by countries, most active institutions, authorship, keywords, title and abstract analysis and citation analysis. The results show that there is an increased growth rate of literature on XBRL from 2001 until 2011. However, the number is slightly lower from 2011 till 2019. There are various studies that have been conducted on XBRL involving the collaboration of multi-authors, published in various languages, by a total of 160 authors from 43 different countries and 160 institutions.