Understanding the trend and GAP of studies related to the banks' financial performance: a review of the literature using bibliometric as well as thematic analysis

The financial performance of banks has been a very eye-catching topic for researchers since the 19th century. This research covers years from 2012 to 2021. This was a period when the pandemic happened and during that period, the functional environment of the banking sector was entirely changed from manual to digital. For extracting the results of this study, 5974 Scopus journals were selected, out of which 4,840 journals are in top-level journals. Then, based on the subject field of finance, business management, accounting, social sciences, and econometrics, 1,917 papers were extracted. Research has been conducted on the 1,917 papers, which are indexed in the Scopus database. Results reflect the countries which primarily did a study on this topic, identify the best journals that publish the research on this topic and even identify the basic keywords used by the various authors related to this topic. The study also identified top researchers associated with this area. Further, Thematic analysis was done to know about the future of the particular topic. Results of thematic analysis depict that profitability, credit risk, and commercial banks are the important themes that are niche covered by the researchers. So these fields required much consideration by the researchers for future research. As per the results, a new area for researchers is to find out the profitability of commercial banks through data envelopment analysis instead of benchmarking.