This study aims to provide detailed insights and identify the influential articles, sources, authors, top contributing countries and predominant themes from the literature on agricultural loans in the domain of economics and finance.
The study employs bibliometric tools to analyse the bibliographic data of 1908 research papers using Biblioshiny from the Bibliometrics R package. The study employed performance analysis, science mapping, and frontline topic analysis methods.
The study identified influential articles, sources, authors, top contributing countries and most frequently employed keywords on agricultural loan literature. Microfinance and rural development; role of government and lending behaviour of financial institutions; credit-risk assessment and credit access for rural regions were observed as functional themes in the intellectual structure and offered important future research avenues. The research community has predominantly employed keywords such as food security, smallholder farmers, debt and banks in the last three years.
This study is helpful to research scholars, professionals, financial institutions and policyholders as it offers valuable insights into trends, themes and current topics on agricultural loan themes from an economics and finance perspective.
The study highlighted the under-researched areas such as regional cultural loan-seeking behaviours, loan insurance and climate change. It offered numerous research suggestions and recommendations for advancing the dialogue on agricultural loan themes.
