Bibliometric overview and retrospective analysis of fund performance research between 1966 and 2019

Fund performance has been a hot topic in the financial research area, fair and correct evaluation of fund performance is of great significance for fund investors and companies. However, most of the relevant publications do not have any retrospective analysis of this topic in terms of knowledge domain to show its development trends and research concerns. To address this issue, two effective bibliometric tools namely Citespace II (The 5.3.R4 Edition) and SciMat are used to analyze the knowledge domain of this field in this paper. We have analyzed 979 articles related to fund performance from Web of Science between 1966 and 2019 (July), the analysis content includes the current status, collaboration network, co-citation network, and emerging trends of fund performance research, then we have derived the following desired conclusions: (1) In the last twenty years, there was a significant increase in the publication and citation numbers of fund performance research; especially, the relative research has become interdisciplinary and internationalized. (2) “Mutual Fund Performance”, “Fund Return”, “Investment Performance”, and “Portfolio Selection” are the hottest topics in the fund performance research. (3) “Small Fund” and “Investor Reaction” are the two emerging trends in the fund performance research. To sum up, there are two main contributions in this paper: First, we provide a full bibliometric analysis about the fund performance research. Second, we make the further development of fund performance research easier and more clearly to show the directions to learn and study for beginners.