Tax Fraud, Tax Evasion, and Tax Avoidance: A Comparative Bibliometric Analysis

Rather than having an obvious relationship, tax fraud, tax evasion, and tax avoidance are extremely difficult concepts to define. This work aims to examine the differences and similarities between published articles using these key terms, and also to identify the main contributions to these different fields. Using a bibliometric approach based on the Scopus database, this research employs indicators to represent bibliographic data on the total number of publications produced between 1995 and 2020. Similarities are visualized using the VOSviewer to represent co-occurrence, bibliographic coupling, and co-citation. The results of the bibliometric analysis show a rapid growth in the annual volume of relevant publications over the last decade. The most cited articles on tax fraud, tax evasion, and tax avoidance over the past 25 years were published in 2011, 1999, and 2003 by Marien and Hooge, Fehr and Schmidt, and Anderson and Reeb, respectively. The most prolific author in this area is Williams of Sheffield University Management School. The Journal of Financial Crime and the Journal of Public Economics are the leading research publications for the key concepts examined. The use of the Scopus database is widely accepted in the academic community, but it has some limitations in terms of the representativeness of the research universe. For those interested in the study of tax fraud, tax evasion and tax avoidance, this work provides an overview of the relevant published articles, identifying the main authors, institutions, countries and bibliographic sources in terms of productivity. This article responds to an identified need to identify differences in the literature around key terms that are not based on a generally accepted theory.