Central Bank Digital Currencies: Bibliometric and Thematic Insights from the Literature

Abstract

This paper offers a bibliometric and thematic analysis of the literature on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), treating the digital euro as a specific euro-area case within the broader CBDC debate. Drawing on 522 peer-reviewed journal articles from Scopus and Web of Science covering the period 2016-2026, this paper combines performance analysis, science mapping, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) text representation, Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) topic modelling, k-means clustering and interpretive content analysis, using Bibliometrix in R, Python, and VOSviewer. The results show a sharp acceleration in academic output from 2021 to 2025 and identify five thematic areas: technology infrastructure; monetary-financial stability; adoption and trust; digital euro governance and design; regulation and crypto-assets. The paper shows that the field has achieved thematic consolidation but remains only partially integrated across institutional, behavioural, technological, and market-oriented research strands.