Carmem Leal, Cidalia Oliveira and Rui Silva
Results and contributions: Five clusters were found using bibliographic coupling, namely: Cluster 1: TCM and inter-organisational relationships; Cluster 2: Management accounting leveraging inter and intra-organisational networks; Cluster 3: TCM applications in Japanese companies; Cluster 4: Management control systems and firm performance and Cluster 5: Accounting change. Purpose: TCM has become increasingly important, as there are several organisations that, due to the nature of their business, have a fixed selling price. This means that managers must work efficiently on price drilling to reach a target cost. Considering the growing trend of this pricing philosophy, to provide information that may be useful to guide both managers, in performing target cost implementation, and researchers, in developing this still growing area. Gap: The identified gap was the need to synthesise this important knowledge area, covering this technique, its main characteristics and summarize the contribution of recent studies in this field. Relevance: The achievements of this paper open new avenues for other TCM researchers because knowledge gaps in existing research were identified, leading to future research inspiration. Impact: This might be the first systematic review of TCM research carried out with bibliometric and mapping analysis since 2015. Methodology: This study systematically reviews papers on TCM, extracted from the Web of Science and Scopus databases, applying two bibliometric analyses on the last five years of data: mapping analysis and bibliographic coupling using the software VOSviewer and R Bibliometrix. A total of 39 papers on TCM from the period 1994âÂÂÂÂÂÂ2020 were analysed. Based on this analysis the most influential authors, articles, journals, institutions, countries, and author collaboration networks were determined.