External audits enhance the credibility of financial statements and are a cornerstone of capital market integrity. However, the growing and complex auditing literature poses challenges for researchers. This survey synthesizes and critically evaluates archival audit research published in top accounting journals from 1995 to 2025, organizing over 600 studies into three core areas: the audit market, audit quality, and audit personnel and processes. We offer new conceptual insights into the audit market, emphasizing that audit assurance is unobservable and that audit fee studies generally estimate reduced‐form models rather than separate demand and supply functions. On audit quality, we expand upon DeAngelo's definition to include the auditor's responsibility to assess ex ante risk. We suggest an alternative three‐dimensional definition of audit quality that is more closely aligned with professional standards. We also clarify common misconceptions arising from conflating audit quality with financial reporting quality. Finally, we review the growing literature on audit personnel and call for more research into underexplored roles of personnel in the early stages of the audit process. Our survey contributes by reframing key constructs, identifying limitations in common proxies, and suggesting future research directions to advance our understanding of how audits function and shape financial reporting outcomes.

This study investigates whether auditors incorporate investor information demand when determining key audit matter (KAM) disclosures. We measure investor information demand using a unique dataset of investor inquiries submitted through investor interactive platforms (IIPs) established by the China Securities Regulatory Commission. At the topic level, we find that auditors are more likely to disclose a given topic as a KAM when investors raise more inquiries on that topic. At the aggregate level, a higher proportion of inquiries devoted to accounting issues is associated with both a greater number of KAMs and longer KAM disclosures. Importantly, following the introduction of KAM reporting, managers’ footnote disclosures become more aligned with heightened investor inquiries, reinforcing our interpretation that the documented effects reflect auditors’ responses to investor inquiries rather than merely mirroring managerial disclosure changes. Overall, our findings suggest that auditors incorporate investor information demand into KAM disclosures.