A bibliometric analysis on poverty alleviation

Purpose - World legends and the scientific community have taken the devastating impact of poverty issue seriously which has been reflected in the growing trend of research in this area. Hence, this paper aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis on poverty alleviation literature, discuss the various dimensions of poverty alleviation and deliver some ideas for future research. Design/methodology/approach - This study deploys a combined quali-quantitative method familiar as meta-literature review on 454 articles collected from the Web of Science (WoS) database with Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) coverage over the period 1971–2020. Using Rstudio, VOSviewer and Excel, the collected data have been analysed from different lenses. Findings - This study considers the most contributing scientific actors like authors, journals, topics, institutions and countries as parameters for analysing articles. Based on the analysis from various perspectives, it determines five main research streams upon which it provides some potential research directions to be considered in future research. Research limitations/implications - This study solely relies on the articles available in the WoS database with index in SSCI. However, it excludes analysing thousands of articles on the same topic available in other platforms. Originality/value - This study provides a retrospective on the scientific works and collective efforts of scholars germane to poverty alleviation from the highest ranked journals, which would help better understand the literature development and the intellectual structure of this field.