Although creative accounting practices are not at all recent, only since 2000 this phenomenon has been widely publicized because of the financial scandals that had erupted worldwide. Obviously, creative accounting practices came to be used with nonchalance at enterprise level, irrespective of their size or the industry within which they operate, fact that appears from different studies undertaken globally in recent years.Even though there are many studies based on the creative accounting phenomenon and on other subjects deriving from it, we considered both interesting and necessary an analysis of the articles that tackle different aspects concerning creative accounting, published after 1990 until now within the highest rated journals in the field of accounting.

The main objective of this study is to identify the main research areas in order to emphasize the main existent shortcomings and to outline possible solutions concerning future research directions in this field. Of course, from this main objective derive a few sub-objectives which we will try to achieve by means of the quantitative study.

The quantitative study is based on the analysis of researches performed in the filed of creative accounting and its aim is to observe their evolution within the concerned period of time, to analyze the main research directions approached, but also to study the predominant research current and the main type of research applied. Moreover, within this stage we have also analyzed the geographical areas on which the studies performed within the selected articles were based. The present study is far from being exhaustive, but it surely represents a starting point and an informative source for future research in the field of creative accounting.

We may conclude that most of the researches conducted within the creative accounting field fall within the main research current, which in our case is positivism. Concerning the type of research, we can observe that the vast majority of articles are of empirical nature, but many theoretical studies have also been published.