Financial Literacy and its Determinants: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Over the last decade, financial literacy has gained increasing interest in the field of research, defined as a combination of financial awareness, knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviours that enables individuals to make informed financial decisions and attain financial well-being. The present study follows the bibliometric approach and uses descriptive, citation, document citation network, co-citation and co-authorship network analysis to a corpus of 407 journal articles on financial literacy and its determinants published between 2017 and 2026 and indexed on Dimensions database. The corpus comprised 723 records initially retrieved and after screening down to 407 to exclude records where the term “financial literacy” was not in the true title or abstract. The results indicate that publications have more than quadrupled since 2019 with India, China, Malaysia, the United States and Indonesia as the top contributors. The most cited external reference in the corpus indicates that the field is most broadly based on the core finance and economics literature and that there is significant dependence on behavioural, organisational and consumer-research literature as a secondary source of reference when discussing the psychological and fintech-related determinants. The co-authorship analysis reveals a scattered field that is distributed globally, and it lacks any dominant research group.