This paper aims to provide a roadmap for developing scholarly work and essential research trends, along with an overview of upcoming studies on the application of green bonds.
This paper uses a bibliometric approach to process 481 articles published between 1994 and 2025 and indexed by SCOPUS with a search protocol – use* AND green bond* OR climate bond* OR green finance* OR transition bond*. R Studio and VOS viewer are used as software.
The results show an increasing interest in green bond research, with 2023 and 2024 having the highest number of published articles on this topic. It is also found that China is the country that produces the most extensive research on green bonds globally. The journal Sustainability published the highest number of articles on green bonds. In terms of publications, Chinese universities and learning institutions contribute more to the use of green bonds. Furthermore, based on the co-occurrence analysis of the authors’ keywords in the research results, green finance and green bonds are two key buzzwords within the stream of research on green bond usage.
As a limitation, this paper is confined to Scopus databases; the Web of Science and other databases may be explored in the future.
This paper provides scholars and practitioners with a solid foundation to depict the knowledge network on using green bonds.
The application of green bonds in a multi-country context has not been studied extensively. Offering an in-depth examination of the use of green bonds from the Scopus database, this paper fills an existing vacuum in the literature.
