Mapping the Accounting–Information Systems Frontier: A Research Agenda for Machine-Readable Disclosure

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🔬研究者:Provides a comprehensive research agenda and framework (MRD Stack) for studying machine-readable disclosure, highlighting gaps in AI and sustainability reporting.

🏢実務担当者:Offers insights into the evolving landscape of digital disclosure, helping corporate teams prepare for AI-driven analysis and sustainability reporting requirements.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the importance of institutions and capacities for effective machine-readable disclosure, relevant for regulators designing digital reporting mandates.

Machine-readable disclosure has matured from a technical pilot into the default format of corporate reporting in the world's major capital markets. Three changes now underway, namely the arrival of large language models capable of reading untagged disclosures, the digitalisation of sustainability disclosure under IFRS S1/S2 and the European Single Electronic Format, and a shift in the empirical base of the field toward emerging markets, unsettle the consensus the literature had reached. We conduct a PRISMA-guided systematic literature review of 362 peer-reviewed studies indexed in Scopus between 2006 and 2026, combining bibliometric performance analysis, science mapping, and structured content analysis under an original five-layer framework, the Machine-Readable Disclosure (MRD) Stack. We find that the field's intellectual base is anchored in the formative United States XBRL regime and contains no co-citation cluster for either generative AI or sustainability reporting. Standards and consequences are well developed; production conditions, infrastructure, and the machine audience are not. The literature has built an apparatus for an audience it named but did not study and has generalised from one well-enforced mandate in one market. We argue that the value of machine-readable disclosure has rested less on the technology the field has built than on the institutions, capacities, and audiences around it, and we offer this thesis as falsifiable rather than rhetorical, with frontier markets as the natural experimental setting. The synthesis yields an integrated forward agenda of eight research questions tied to the MRD Stack, with implications for regulators, preparers, intermediaries, and emerging-market policymakers.

• openaire https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7004918first seen 2026-08-04 04:51:37