How much has been said about corruption? A text analytics method for literature review

Corruption is a global problem that has a disproportionate impact on the poor and most vulnerable, increasing costs and reducing access to services, including health, education and justice. Italy is ranked at 52nd position on a total of 180 countries surveyed by Transparency International and updated in 2020. Several studies have been conducted worldwide on the phenomenon of corruption from the point of view of many aspects of daily life: political, legal, social, economical, educational, civic and territorial context. The aim of this paper is to explore how the corruption has been threated and the context where it has been investigated in national and international literature by a keyword-string search method of the term ‘corruption’ across academic electronic database (i.e. Scopus), A quantitative coding scheme was implemented to provide descriptive statistics, ranking of the more frequents tokens, co-occurrence analysis, graphs and community detection networks. One of the issues is to study the relationship between words using graphs representation by Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm. This representation helps to visualize the most repeated connections between words along all the literature analyzed. A second issue is to identify communities inside a network using Girvan-Newman algorithm: the subset of nodes that are densely connected to each other and loosely connected to the nodes in the other communities in the same graph leads to capture words or groups of largely used together and brings to identify indicators most used to represent and define the complex and latent phenomenon of corruption. The main contribution of this paper is double: from one side a result is to carry out a new approach to a systematic literature review, “a type of knowledge synthesis, follow a systematic approach to map evidence on a topic and identify main concepts, theories, sources, and knowledge gaps.” (Tricco et al, 2018); strongly linked to the previous one, the second contribution is to discover inside this ‘scoping’ review a set of socio-economic indicators of corruption more discussed and studied on this issue and walk the steps towards the operationalization of such as multidimensional phenomenon.