In auditor we trust: 44 years of research on the auditor-client relationship and future research directions

Author’s accepted manuscript. This author accepted manuscript is deposited under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC) licence. This means that anyone may distribute, adapt, and build upon the work for non-commercial purposes, subject to full attribution. If you wish to use this manuscript for commercial purposes, please contact permissions@emerald.com. Purpose—This study systematically reviews the auditor-client relationship (ACR) literature spanning 1976 to 2019 to provide future research directions. Design/Methodology/Approach—The study analysed 140 articles from the Web of Science database, authored by 259 scholars across 28 countries and published i…