Analysis of scientometric maps in scientific productions regarding the Career path of accountants

Abstract
Purpose: One of the biggest challenges in every person's life is choosing a job, which is affected by very important factors. Choosing a job is not an easy decision and has a lasting impact on a person's future. A person's environment, talents, skills, and educational progress affect the choice of a job, and if the wrong choice is made, it may lead to failure and disappointment. Based on this, the reason for choosing a job by a person is to earn money and social status, which will ultimately affect a person's personality, behavior and perspective. The career path or in other words the professional development path is a long-term and complex process that is influenced by psychological, sociological, educational, physical, economic and environmental factors.
Methodology: According to its purpose, this article is considered to be a descriptive-applied type of research. In this research, various scientometric techniques have been used to analyze scientific productions. The data required for this study were extracted from Web of Science database. One of the unique features of the mentioned database is the ability to search through citations. It also allows users to narrow their search by title, subject, author. The statistical population of this study includes a collection of scientific research articles on the profession and occupation of accountants, which were published in the Web of Science database from 1972 to 2022. The initial search results included 4435 articles, of which 269, 647, 3077 and 39 studies were respectively not published in English, choosing "article" as the type of document (due to the exclusion of non-reviewed articles, conferences and books) from the search), selecting three fields close to the accounting field (management, business and economics) and discarding the articles of 2023 were removed.
Findings: The process of publishing articles on the subject of accountants' career development showed that despite the ups and downs between the years under review, it was found that researchers' desire to conduct studies in this field has increased. So that the most articles were published in 2020 and 2021 and the least in 1972. The results of co-occurrence of words showed that in the fifth cluster, the word "work" with 61 occurrences is one of the favorite words of researchers and also the most used word in the text of scientific studies. Factors such as gender, mobility, job satisfaction and performance are related to the word Career. According to the co-authorship map of the countries, it can be seen that the United States of America has become the research pole of the professional progress of accountants with 20 connections and publication of 137 articles. England ranks second with 17 connections and publication of 51 articles.
Conclusion: The purpose of this study is to draw scientific maps about the professional development path of accountants. In scientometric research, the first point that should be considered is the importance of quantitative and qualitative information about the subject under investigation. Such studies depict hidden realities in every scientific field. Undoubtedly, remote research points can become bigger challenges in the future or show incredible prospects for further research and reducing study gaps. The data required for this research were extracted from the scientific database of Web of Science and scientific maps were drawn using VOSviewer software. The present study first examined the publication process of the scientific outputs indexed in the Web of science database. The results indicated that in recent years, the articles about career path have grown and attracted the attention of researchers. Also, the first article titled "Gender Career Paths" was published in 1998. In other words, it can be said that the research in the field of employment starts from this year. In the vocabulary co-occurrence map, among 1977 keywords, 114 words had the minimum threshold value (ie at least 5 repetitions). The findings of this mapping also show the importance of the word work along with the words career success, career development, career and career path. In the co-authorship map of countries, 57 countries had published at least 1 article. Based on the results of this map, it was found that America is known as the largest research center with the publication of 137 articles and 20 communications. As mentioned, Iran has no place in this map. This shows Iran's non-cooperation with other countries on the subject under investigation. Also, by a large margin, the second place is England with the publication of 51 articles and 17 communications.