Deposit insurance is a tool to enhance banking stability in a country, by augmenting the confidence of the bank depositors and reducing their incentive to run on banks. Over the years, this instrument of bank safety net has garnered considerable attention, owing to the advent of multiple banking shocks and financial crises. This is a first-of-its-kind study that aims to trace the development of deposit insurance research over the past 50 years, from 1971 to 2021, through bibliometric analysis and network visualization. A total of 1322 research articles and reviews on deposit insurance, drawn from the Scopus database, have been examined and synthesized through volume analysis, citation analysis, co-authorship analysis, co-citation analysis and keyword co-occurrence analysis. Two well-known bibliometric tools, VOSviewer and Biblioshiny, have been used to create and analyze various bibliometric maps, networks and tables. This study uncovers the temporal and spatial trends of publications on deposit insurance, the most influential documents, authors, journals and countries in this domain, the status of collaborations and the major themes that have been studied in the literature. The paper also highlights new concepts that have emerged over the past five decades and suggests future avenues for research in this area.