Impact investing: a bibliometric analysis of scientific literature

The current study intends to understand the spectrum of existing scientific literature on Impact Investing, explore the publication credentials of that literature in the form of bibliometrics, and investigate the future scope for research in the area of impact investing. We have used the visualization tool VOSviewer to analyze the bibliometric data collected from the Scopus database. ‘Sustainable development’ was identified as the most used keyword in the documents, followed by ‘corporate social responsibility’, ‘investment’, and ‘environmental performance’. The United States was the leading contributing country followed by the UK, China, Italy, Canada, and India. Based on the systematic review of 753 journal articles, we have identified five distinct research areas in the field of impact investing. The top five research clusters are sustainable development research, sustainability research, corporate social responsibility research, Sustainable investment research, and environmental economics research. Our results revealed a dearth of focus among researchers in identifying impact investing either as a standalone concept or as a concept that drives better performance in organizations. Hence, we propose some promising areas of impact investing research. They are sustainable finance, firm performance, tourism, and climate change research. The output of this research has implications for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and academia since it pinpoints the popular and promising clusters of research in the field of impact investing. Our study is unique and original in the sense that it covers a more comprehensive inclusion, and exclusion criteria as well as keyword combinations and thus, it provides better directions for future research in the field.