The study aims to systematically map and synthesize the global research landscape on bank performance by employing a bibliometric approach. Using Biblioshiny as an analytical tool, the study conducts a structured extraction and comprehensive analysis of literature indexed in the scopus database. This process results in a final dataset consisting of 2,636 peer-reviewed articles published between 1990 and 2026. The analysis explores key dimensions, including publication trends, influential countries, leading institutions, prominent authors, and high-impact journals, as well as the intellectual and conceptual structures that underpin bank performance research. The findings reveal that the literature has historically been dominated by contributions from advanced economies with well-established financial systems, particularly the United States and several European countries. However, there has been a noticeable increase in contributions from developing and emerging economies in recent years, reflecting a more geographically diverse research landscape. From a conceptual perspective, bank performance research continues to be strongly anchored in core themes such as profitability, financial performance, efficiency, and corporate governance. Nevertheless, thematic evolution and trend analyses indicate a gradual shift toward more multidimensional perspectives. Recent studies increasingly integrate topics such as risk management, sustainability, digital transformation, financial technology (fintech), and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations. Furthermore, external shocks most notably the COVID-19 pandemic along with rapid digitalization, have significantly influenced both research directions and methodological approaches. Despite the expanding scope of the literature, the study identifies persistent conceptual fragmentation, particularly in efforts to simultaneously integrate governance, risk, technology, and sustainability within unified analytical frameworks. Overall, this study provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution, dominant themes, and emerging research opportunities in bank performance studies, offering valuable insights for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners aiming to foster more resilient, adaptive, and sustainable banking systems.
This study analyses the development, conceptual foundations, and emerging directions of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) research, with particular emphasis on its contribution to business sustainability and financial performance. It aims to map the dominant research themes in the ESG literature, examine the contributions of prominent authors, institutions, journals, and countries, and identify promising avenues for future research. The study adopts a quantitative bibliometric approach based on secondary data drawn from the Scopus database. A structured screening procedure was applied to peer reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings, and review papers published in English between 2015 and 2025 that explicitly addressed ESG concepts, yielding a final sample of 2,878 publications from 607 journals. Bibliometric indicators, including authorship patterns, citation structures, institutional and country contributions, journal sources, and keyword co occurrences, were examined using VOSviewer and R Studio (Biblioshiny). The findings indicate significant expansion and diversification of ESG research over the study period, organised around six core thematic clusters: sustainable development, business values, corporate social responsibility, ESG disclosure, ESG investment, and corporate strategy. The study identifies the most influential contributors and sources shaping ESG scholarship and points to growing research opportunities in the strategic and financial integration of ESG factors.
A. Jain, Prabhat Kumar Sharma, Alok Mishra et al.· International journal of bus...· 0 citations
This study examines the global evolution of performance audit research over the past five decades by identifying publication trends, influential contributors and dominant thematic developments. A bibliometric methodology was employed using 800 publications indexed in the Scopus database from 1975 to 2025. Performance analysis and science-mapping techniques were conducted using Harzing’s Publish or Perish and VOSviewer to analyse citation patterns, co-authorship networks and keyword co-occurrence relationships. The findings reveal substantial growth in performance audit scholarship, particularly after 2010, with the United States, United Kingdom and Australia emerging as dominant contributors. The literature remains strongly centred on public-sector governance, accountability and managerial reform, while themes related to ESG reporting, digital governance, AI-assisted auditing, sustainability evaluation and cross-sector applications remain comparatively underdeveloped. Citation patterns further indicate that influential studies primarily emphasise performance measurement and organisational control rather than broader public value and societal outcomes. Theoretically, the study demonstrates that performance audit research has evolved operationally but remains institutionally driven and conceptually fragmented, highlighting the need for more integrative and outcome-oriented frameworks. Practically, the findings provide insights for policymakers, Supreme Audit Institutions and statutory bodies, including zakat institutions, to strengthen performance auditing as a mechanism for organisational learning, governance improvement and outcome-oriented accountability. The originality of this study lies in providing one of the earliest comprehensive bibliometric syntheses of global performance
M. Suffian, Mohamed Esa, Hairunnizam Wahid et al.· International Research Journ...· 0 citations
The research analyses the evolution and spread of integrated reporting, with a focus on the United Kingdom, one of the leading and most influential collaborative hubs in this field. By processing 1,665 scientific studies from the Scopus database, the bibliometric analysis performed using VOSviewer (v1.6.20) identified the most important publications, influential authors, and significant trends. The research provides a global overview of the evolution of integrated reporting, analysing geographical distribution, scientific fields, document types, keywords, citation patterns, frequently cited works, and funding sources that indicate institutional interest. The results highlight advantages such as increased transparency, more effective communication with stakeholders, and support for sustainable strategic decision-making. Although progress has been made, challenges remain, such as the lack of a common framework that everyone agrees on and the difficulty of measuring non-financial capital. The study also highlights new trends and developments, emphasizing the growing importance of integrated reporting in supporting long-term sustainability and corporate responsibility.
Timea Krisztina Ardelean· International Scientific Con...· 0 citations
This study presents a thorough bibliometric and systematic review, devoted specifically to the literature concerned with the relationship between ESG investment and a firm's financial performance, by identifying crucial areas of future investigation. The paper presents a combined bibliometric and systematic literature review of 168 publications indexed in Scopus to cluster them into thematic groups, authors with the most impact, and geographical distribution with VOSviewer, and synthesize significant results of the literature on the area of corporate governance within ESG investment, performance, and ESG‐related regulatory and investment policy. Based on these findings, we suggest a TCCM framework that reveals the gaps in the theoretical perspective, methodological constraints, and sector‐specificities in ESG adoption in investment and corporate financial contexts. We find in our analysis that research is concentrated heavily in developed markets, that a variety of emerging regions are under‐represented, and that evidence on the financial benefits of ESG is mixed and usually context and measurement‐dependent. We end with specific recommendations of corporate governance within ESG investment to boards, regulators, and investors, and suggest a priority agenda for future empirical research. The article is relevant to ESG investment and financial‐performance research because it unites visual bibliometrics with formal SLR synthesis to inform scholarly and practitioner audiences. Existing literature on the review of ESG focuses solely on bibliometric trends or thematic discussions as independent analysis, where this paper combines bibliometric mapping, systematic synthesis of themes, and TCCM‐based structure to identify theoretical, contextual, and methodological gaps as an avenue for future ESG investment and financial‐performance research.
Unknown authors· Corporate Social Responsibil...· 0 citations
The Blue Economy framework has been on the rise in promoting sustainability for economic development while preserving coastal and marine ecosystems. Regardless of the mounting academic research done, the broader study and thematic directions of Blue Economy are incoherent. The objective of this study is to map out the trends in publication, prevailing research themes and key contributors in Blue Economy using bibliometric analysis. Scopus databases were used to retrieve bibliometric data by using “blue economy” as keyword with English-language documents chosen to identify preferred documents. VOSviewer was used to analyse all 2,346 documents. This study has used descriptive analysis to examine the trend in publication and key contributors while to identify the thematic structure, the “co-occurrence” keyword analysis was employed. From the result, it implicates a steady development over the years in Blue Economy publication, indicating scholarly attention to the area. Four major thematic clusters emerge after analysing using co-occurrence keywords: ecosystems and environmental management, governance and sustainability, fisheries and aquaculture, marine renewable energy and ocean-based technologies as well as marine resource utilisation. Although this features the diverse discipline across Blue Economy, the results also indicate that integration across governance, environmental, technological, and livelihood-focused areas is limited. In general, this paper has offered a systematic review of the current state of Blue Economy research literature and has offered insights to aid further research and policy models on more comprehensive and inclusive marine development pathways.
Type of the article: Research ArticleAbstractSustainable finance has evolved from a set of environmental, social and governance principles and specialized instruments into a field concerned with the transformation of financial institutions, markets and public policy. This study examines the conceptual structure, temporal evolution, and cross-thematic integration of sustainable finance research, while identifying the institutional mechanisms and unresolved coordination gaps. A combined bibliometric and qualitative content analysis was conducted on 11,629 Scopus-indexed articles and reviews published between 2000 and 2025. Keyword co-occurrence mapping generated a network comprising 383 terms across four clusters, while qualitative analysis covered 30 influential and recent publications. Publication activity was highly concentrated in 2020–2025, which accounted for 84.4% of the corpus. Cross-cluster relationships represented 59.5% of the network’s total weighted link strength, indicating thematic interconnectedness. The strongest integration linked green finance and the energy transition with regulation, technology, and the green economy. The qualitative synthesis identified six research streams, with banks emerging as the most prominently represented transmission channel, while coordination among monetary, prudential, fiscal, environmental, industrial and capital-market policies remained fragmented. These streams provide the basis for a preliminary five-function conceptual framework for financial system coordination encompassing information production and verification, governance, financial intermediation and investment, public-policy design and rule-setting, and digital and analytical infrastructure. The study distinguishes thematic integration within the literature from actual institutional coordination, thereby providing regulators and financial institutions with an analytical basis for designing sustainable finance policy mixes rather than relying on isolated instruments.AcknowledgmentsThe authors acknowledge with gratitude the financial support provided by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine for the research project “Financial and institutional framework for the sustainable recovery of Ukraine’s economy: an ESG-oriented model of interaction between the state, financial, and real sectors”, state registration number 0126U000594.
O. Pakhnenko, O. Kryklii, Lyudmyla Pavlenko et al.· Investment Management & Fina...· 0 citations
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