Purpose The study aims to explore a retrospective overview of the Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting and Financial Management , a prestigious international journal in the discipline. It also analyses the bibliometric information of its publications between 2011 and 2021 in terms of authors, countries, documents, themes, topics and sources. Design/methodology/approach The performance analysis and science mapping were conducted using the data from Scopus between 2011 and 2021. The bibliometric information of 301 publications was visualised through the analysis types, such as co-authorship, co-citation and bibliographic coupling, through the VOSviewer software programme. Findings The main finding is that the journal has recently improved in several areas (e.g. its productivity and visibility, citations, index scores and international collaborations). Although financial aspects such as accounting and accountability, financial management and public budgeting maintained their importance during the analysing period, some other features were revealed as new research themes. However, there are some research gaps regarding sustainable development goals, climate change and other matters, and the solutions for them through public fiscal policies. Research limitations/implications The analyses are primarily backwards oriented by their very nature. Although they were excellent at portraying the past, the findings provided limited information about subjects that would be hot topics in future. The study has some limitations. The information on publications was collected from the Scopus database. However, bibliometric analyses were conducted from 2011 to 2021 as its data on Scopus did not cover before 2011. Second, the data are dynamic over time and may contain various changes in the future. Therefore, the bibliometric analysis may be repeated by including new studies of JPBAFM in the following years. Social implications A performance analysing that the editorial team could benefit from in order to monitor the productivity of JPBAFM , one of the popular and favoured journals in the discipline, was conducted in this paper. The editorial team may also find ideas for the intellectual development of the journal as a result of mapping the performance of the publications. Originality/value The bibliographic analysis of the Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting and Financial Management has yet to be conducted. The study presents comprehensive findings on the performance and bibliometric analysis of the journal to guide authors and readers.
