Bibliometric analysis of global research trends on microfinance institutions and microfinance: Suggesting new research agendas

Abstract

Poverty alleviation is a global problem. To alleviate poverty, microfinancing is used through microfinance institutions. There are many publications comprising empirical and literature review articles beside others focusing on this issue. Subjectivity bias is one of the issues that is seen in the literature reviews in an area of interest. This study answers the problem based on the bibliometric analysis of microfinance, micro‐finance institutions, micro‐insurance, micro‐savings, and financial inclusion with other synonyms using the Scopus Database. This article focuses on overall historical trends, publication output, prolific authors and journals, google mapping of the world‐renowned academic institutions, and highlights the shortcoming of the Scopus database by utilizing software for the first time. We use VOSviewer, for co‐authorship analysis and our results underline the leading role of United States contribution to a greater extent, while co‐citation analysis shows emerging hotspots such as financial technology including fintech, crowdfunding, and financial literacy. We concluded limited attention from scholars towards natural‐resource revenues, financial development using fintech, and crowdfunding regarding poverty alleviation. Furthermore, for the interest of the development researchers and practitioners, we have highlighted the conceptual framework for financial development, natural resource abundance, economic growth nexus through fintech, crowdfunding, financial literacy to curb poverty as new avenues for future research agenda.

Bibliometric analysis of finance and natural resources: past trend, current development, and future prospects

“…Besides the impact factor, the CiteScore metric is considered an alternative for determining journal impact and is based on citation data from the Scopus database (Ali et al, 2022b ; Khudzari et al, 2018 ). Examining the impact factor of these journals, Table 1 illustrates that Energy Economics with IF (7.042) is in the lead, followed by the Journal of Environmental Management (6.789), Energy Policy (6.142), Resources Policy (5.634), and Environmental Science and Pollution Research (4.223).…”

“…Figure 6 shows the bibliometric knowledge map based on co-authorship with network visualization using VOSviewer. The countries are clustered into seven regions (Ali et al, 2022b ; Roser Max and Ortiz-Ospina Esteban, 2013 ; World Bank, 2020 ) by assigning different colors for clarity. The distance and line thickness between the countries show their relatedness and link strength, respectively.…”

“…Financial development could be possible with the help of technological innovation leading to economic growth (Adak, 2015 ; Ahmad et al, 2020 ; Khan et al, 2020c ; Pan et al, 2019 ) as well as through technology like FinTech and crowdfunding (Ali et al, 2022b ; Liu et al, 2020 ; Loo, 2019 ; Wu, 2017 ) especially in crises such as the global pandemic caused by COVID-19. Such financial development might help mitigate the risks associated with contract enforcement, transaction costs, and expanding the financial inclusion network to remote areas.…”

“…However, its use in finance is relatively new (Zaby, 2019 ). By utilizing network mapping and quantitative techniques for analyzing the resource-finance nexus literature, the authors expect to make a substantial contribution by identifying the evolution of past trends and current developments and thus present a valuable reference for future research prospects (Ali et al, 2022b ; Maia et al, 2019 ).…”

“…The authors were listed based on the h-index obtained from their articles indexed in the Scopus database on the resource-finance nexus. The h-index is a metric that measures the productivity and impact of scholar’s research work and is described as the h number of articles with citations number greater or equal to h (Hirsch, 2005 ), and is widely used in bibliometric research studies (Ali et al, 2022b ; Bornmann et al, 2008 ; Maia et al, 2019 ; Rahman et al, 2022 ). Similarly, this table shows the top countries in terms of publications on the resource-finance nexus, single country publications, and most productive institutions (Stages 4.1 and 4.2).…”