Examining Enterprise Risk Management Research using Bibliometric Analysis

The concept of enterprise risk management (ERM) has received attention as a system to manage organisational-wide risk by employing a more integrated and holistic strategy. Due to the complexity of the business environment, emerging risks and the strengthening of business resilience during a crisis, enterprise risk management is relevant, particularly for business organisations. As a result, numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the determinants and implications of adopting or implementing ERM. Thus, this paper examines the nature and current trends of enterprise risk management research using bibliometric analysis. A total of 518 documents were retrieved from the Scopus database. Our analyses provide evidence that enterprise risk management has been explored in various disciplines, mostly business, management, and accounting. The results also reveal the increasing trends of ERM research, which is associated with crises like financial and pandemic outbreaks. More importantly, the result of keyword analysis demonstrates five main themes that best capture the heterogeneous nature of ERM research. However, the business and accounting themes still offer a limited number of keywords. Therefore, this study reveals a promising and multidisciplinary field of research and provides insightful information for future research. It is also a starting point for professionals and researchers to fully understand the elements of ERM research and the potentiality for a more systematic approach.


Introduction
Over the past few decades, the effectiveness of risk management systems implemented by organisations has been getting stakeholders' attention. The evolution of the risk management concept can be seen throughout the year from the traditional approach to the more integrated approach of risk management, also known as 'enterprise risk management (ERM)'. The coronavirus disease (Covid 19) brings greater attention globally due to its impact on daily life, individuals' norm, and the organisation's operational activities (Verma & Gustafsson, 2020). Many countries have taken the initiative by declaring a phased lockdown and stay-at-home policy to reduce Covid 19 cases. In response, businesses need to reduce the effect of the pandemic to avoid poor performance and bankruptcy (Sampaio et al., 2022) and adopt enterprise risk management to strengthen organisational resilient (Marquez-Tejon et al., 2022).
Enterprise risk management is a systematic and integrated approach to the management of the total risks that an organisation faces (Dickinson, 2001). Beasley, Pagach, and Warr (2008) defined enterprise risk management as the process of analysing the portfolio of risks facing the enterprise to ensure that the combined effect of such risks is within an acceptable tolerance. According to Dickinson (2001), ERM happens due to high-profile companies failing and suffering significant losses; as a result, corporate governance should be expanded to include the management of the firm's risks as well as a larger role for shareholder value models in strategic planning. Therefore, it is suggested to conduct risk management based on a holistic approach rather than a silo-based approach (Gordon et al., 2009) by integrating risk management into corporate governance as well as business strategies.
ERM plays an important role in strategic planning. The ERM systems improve operational and strategic decisions and reduce risks' direct and indirect costs (Florio & Leoni, 2017). The boards of directors and senior managers are now more directly accountable for the company's risks, overseeing the enterprise's portfolio risks (Beasley, Clune, & Hermanson, 2005). ERM also creates value for firms when there are real costs to shareholders from idiosyncratic risks (Beasley et al., 2008). ERM has the ability to manage those risks in a dynamic business environment (Gordon et al., 2009). Empirically, ERM can lower a firm's total risks, which later improves performance and increases firm value (Florio & Leoni, 2017).
Despite the growing interest in ERM studies, there have been relatively limited attempts to report the trend of research, particularly those that used a bibliometric approach. A study conducted by Marquez-Tejon et al (2022) conducted a bibliometric analysis that focused mainly on security risk management and found a close linkage between security risk management with ERM in the period between 2009 and 2019. In the situation of globalisation and changing world, organisations are being pressured by emerging risks like technology risks and health risks which demand companies to have more adaptive risk management for organisational resilience. Meanwhile, Nobanee et al (2021) explored the importance of sustainability and risk-associated factors. This paper extends prior research by providing valuable insight into multidisciplinary fields of ERM and the loopholes in the current research and publications. Hence, this study can help future researchers explore the ERM concept more strategically by referring to the current dynamism of ERM research. This study is driven by the following research questions (RQs) RQ1: What is the current state of the article's publication and citation patterns in the ERM studies? RQ2: Which themes and keywords gaining more popularity among scholars of ERM?

Literature Review
The bibliometric approach normally analyses the nature of documents in terms of quantity, quality and the structural mapping of the gathered data (Kushairi & Ahmi, 2021). The quantity analysis includes the total number of publications and citations per year and a total number of publications by the categories like source title, source type, country, institution, language, and subject area (Kushairi & Ahmi, 2021). The quality analysis is done by analysing each selected document's contents (Sampaio et al., 2022). Lastly, the structural map by network mapping provides network analysis of the co-occurrence for keywords or authors' names (Ahmi & Nasir, 2019;Kushairi & Ahmi, 2021). The actions can be done by gathering a large volume of scientific literature (Nobanee et al., 2021), making it more valuable than a systematic literature review.
The bibliometric approach provides several benefits. First, bibliometric analysis is considered an accurate and potentially equitable tool for measuring a paper's contribution to knowledge advancement (Kushairi & Ahmi, 2021). It portrays the nature and course of specific research (Sampaio et al., 2022). Besides, it helps guide researchers to the most influential works and map a research field without subjective bias (Zupic & Cater, 2015). Bibliometric analysis anticipates a similar form of systematic literature reviews and rigorous techniques that guarantee the quality of the information used and the results' output generated (Nobanee et al., 2021). Further, it will provide up-to-date data analysis for more reliable results (Sampaio et al., 2022).

Methods
This study conducts a topic search using the Scopus database, establishes a research protocol, and analyses the collected documents using the bibliometric method (refer to Figure 1). (Kushairi & Ahmi, 2021) We extracted data from the Scopus database as of 1 June 2022. The following combination of keywords was used: "enterprise risk management", "consolidated risk Language: All ARTICLE TITLE ("enterprise risk management" OR "consolidated risk management" OR "holistic risk management" OR "integrated risk management" OR "chief risk officer" OR "enterprise-wide risk management" ) management", "holistic risk management", "integrated risk management", "chief risk officer", or "enterprise-wide risk management". The targeted publications are limited to journal articles and conference papers, which led to the final sample consisting of 518 documents. Additionally, the final sample only consists of paper written in English. There is no time limit included in searching for the documents. Then, this study uses Microsoft Excel, Harzing's Publish or Perish and VOSviewer software for data analysis and visualisation.

Results
Some general statistics from the data sets are offered to give an overview of the research on ERM. The following criteria were used to analyse all the documents based on the following analysis: documents and source types, growth of publications and citations, distribution of publications by countries, subject area, citation analysis based on authors, and keywords analysis.   Figure 3 reports the source type for all the collected documents. The documents are divided into four sources: journal, conference proceeding, book series and trade journal. Most of the analysed documents belong to the journal article, contributing about 69.11%. The second highest document source comes from conference proceedings which are 26.25%. A few documents in the article and conference proceeding in Figure 2 are split into either the book series or trade journal. However, both sources provide lesser contributions, with the percentage value of book series being 4.05% and trade journal being 0.58%. Figure 4 shows the annual growth of total publications for ERM studies. Since ERM is the evolution from the traditional approach of risk management (financial risk management or hedging or financial derivatives), thus only a few researchers participate in the publications of ERM literature before 2000. Interestingly, in 1997 and 1998, there was an event of the Asian financial crisis that expected businesses to be more resilient by adopting a more robust risk management system.  (544 citations). However, there are also small numbers of citations for the documents published before 2010, although the period is more than 10 years. The results indicate that the documents are typically conceptual papers at the earliest study and have less statistical results. Therefore, it affects on the number of citations.

Distribution of Publications by Countries
Based on the top 20 countries that contributed to the total publications (Table 1), the United States is at the top of the list (130 publications). Three Asian countries ranked among the top 10 of the lists: China (48 publications), Malaysia (44 publications), and Indonesia (17 publications). Three European countries also contributed to the top 10 lists: the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy. The results prove that ERM publications dominated among researchers from the United States, the pioneering country that introduced the ERM concept. Besides, the ERM framework developed by the Committee of Sponsoring Organisations (COSO) in the United States is adopted by most countries.  Table 2 presents the distribution of documents based on subject areas. Overall, ERM has been studied in diverse subject areas, including business/management, economics, mathematics, engineering, computer, environment, science, and medicine. Nonetheless, ERM is largely explored in business/management, accounting, economics, econometrics, finance and engineering. Most documents fall under business, management and accounting, representing 62.99% of the total sample documents. Consistently with the term 'management', various researchers in business and management pursue an interest in the ERM. However, ERM is important not only for the business organisation but also for other disciplines such as arts and humanities, public administration, educational institutions and other non-profit organisations. Besides, the managing of environmental issues to ensure global sustainability. In summary, ERM provides an opportunity to be explored in various disciplines and is not specific only to business and management.  Table 3 presents the top 20 highly cited articles in the enterprise risk management field. It is based on the number of times being cited. The document entitled 'the value of enterprise risk management' by Hoyt and Liebenberg (2011) Figure 6 shows the network visualisation mapping of the co-occurrence of keywords. There are five main clusters can be identified as 1) business and accounting (purple colour), 2) economics and finance (light blue colour), 3) information management and technology (dark blue and green colour), 4) construction and project management (red colour), and 5) organisational behaviours (yellow colour). Many keywords are found in the information management and technology cluster compared to other clusters. Nonetheless, only a few numbers of keywords are recorded in the business and accounting cluster, like firm value, firm performance, board of directors, risk governance, hazards, and sustainable development.

Discussion and Conclusion
This study aims to explore the development of the ERM research field using bibliometric analysis. The bibliometric analysis provides an opportunity to evaluate the research's productivity and publications in a specific research domain (Ahmi & Nasir, 2019). This study reports the trends of earlier studies from 1997 until the current year. The analysis covers the annual growth of research based on total publications, numbers of citations, distributions of publications based on countries, the most cited authors and keywords analysis. Five hundred eighteen (518) documents were extracted from a Scopus database, mainly in English.
The annual growth of research shows an increasing trend of ERM studies publications, especially after 2010. The ERM studies started in the 1990s, especially since it became the main concern after the Asian financial crisis of 1997/98. The regulatory reforms also happened, like Sarbanes Oxley Act 2002 and Turnbull report that highlights pertaining to effective corporate governance and risk management (Beasley et al., 2005;Dickinson, 2001). The emergence of corporate failures and governance scandals also pressures companies to strengthen their risk management practices. Besides, the global crisis of 2008 also questioned the effectiveness of financial risk management and was seen as insufficient for managing complex business environments. Therefore, the results of this study show the consistency of increasing publication trends with the complexity of business environments, such as the global financial crisis or numerous risks like a pandemic outbreak and geo-political risks. There is an inconsistent trend for the total number of citations, but the highest citations were recorded in 2011.
Furthermore, the results of this study show that more than 50% of the documents were published in business, management and accounting. Most publications come from authors affiliated in developed countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, etc. A few countries in emerging economies like China, Malaysia and Indonesia are also listed as the top 10 contributors in the ERM studies. Studies in developed countries receive the largest citations as compared to emerging economies. The situation happens due to the readiness and pressures by the regulators towards ERM implementation in the developed markets. For instance, Standard and Poor's produced ERM quality ratings for insurance companies (McShane et al., 2011) and practitioners' contribution in assessing ERM effectiveness (Farrell & Gallagher, 2015;Grace et al., 2015). Based on the distribution of keywords, ERM studies covered various disciplines. Five themes are discovered: business and accounting, economics and finance, information management and technology, construction and project management, and organisational behaviours.
Despite the enlightening results, this study has several limitations, mostly because of the sources of the documents obtained from the Scopus database. Prior studies also employed other databases like the Web of Sciences and Google Scholar to obtain documents, although Scopus is one of the large databases that index scholarly works (Ahmi & Mohd Nasir, 2019;Sampaio et al., 2022). Secondly, the results only emerged from the keywords related to ERM and specified only documents' titles. The main reason is to ensure only pertinent papers associated with ERM will be examined and to eliminate irrelevant materials. Despite these limitations, this study has contributed to the knowledge by presenting the ERM research trends that cover multidisciplinary fields. This study also has the turning points to guide future researchers in exploring research avenues in ERM.