What is going on with studies on banking efficiency?

We analyse and present the current mainstream research on banking efficiency by assessing recent articles from major finance journals. We examine 87 papers that were published between January 2011 and July 2017. We classify these manuscripts based on study type, approach, objective, and method. We apply clusters and citation networks to identify the evolution of the studies, including research gaps and paradigms. We also analyse the origin of the studies through geographical coordinates to visualize the global connections among the articles. Our study contributes to a future research agenda, studies’ integration at international level, and a dissemination of relevant findings on the topic. Moreover, using Lotka's Law, we find that the field of banking efficiency had low productivity, without a significant number of prolific specialized authors or institutions.