Scientometrics of Poverty Research for Sustainability Development: Trend Analysis of the 1964–2022 Data through Scopus

Abstract

Over the last six decades, significant progress has been made in studying poverty. Poverty research is an important issue for ensuring the sustainable development and governance of the world, especially the lower-income regions. More attention from multiple dimensions shall be paid to poverty research. However, apart from a few research publications, less research has investigated their citations using the most widely used approach for citation mapping—Scientometric analysis. Therefore, this research utilized 319 published papers on poverty research from 1964 to 20 February 2022, from the Scopus database to conduct bibliometric and social network analysis. The bibliometrix package in R and the VOSviewer program were used to perform data analysis and visualization. Theme mapping, trend themes, bibliometric coupling, and co-occurrence networks were utilized to discover potential study areas for existing and future trends. The findings reveal that poverty research has increased by 10.18% each year since 2006. Additionally, the results indicate the most influential sections of the research based on the most often mentioned subjects, papers, authors, and keywords. The findings indicate that future studies should focus on the poverty line, social policies, and living standards. The contributions of the paper may provide a reference to the understanding of poverty research through bibliometric analysis and promote poverty research in theory and practice.