From Dual Pathways to Emerging Triadic Convergence: A Bibliometric Analysis of Sustainable Finance, Digital Transformation, and Circular Economy—2015–2025

Sustainable finance has evolved rapidly in tandem with digital transformation and the circular economy; however, the simultaneous integration of these three domains remains fragmented. This study analyzes the intellectual structure of the field through a bibliometric analysis of a curated corpus of 2537 articles indexed in Scopus between 2015 and 2025, of which 2471 were classified into three thematic trajectories: sustainable finance combined with digital transformation (D1), sustainable finance combined with the circular economy (D2), and triadic convergence (D3). The classification followed a deductive, rule-based procedure, with documents independently coded by the two authors and discrepancies resolved by consensus. VOSviewer was used to construct networks of keyword co-occurrence, co-citation, and bibliographic coupling, identifying four thematic clusters. A complementary keyword-overlap projection was then used to articulate the deductive classification with the inductive clusters. The results reveal a rapidly expanding field, geographically concentrated in China, in which the dyadic trajectories anchor predominantly in a single conceptual cluster, while triadic convergence (D3), which appears only in 2021 and accounts for 2.7% of the classified corpus, is the only trajectory whose documents distribute across three clusters simultaneously. This pattern provides empirical support for interpreting triadic convergence as an emerging frontier rather than a consolidated stream. The findings are interpreted under the lens of economicità, an Italian accounting concept that frames sustainability as a condition for the firm’s long-term economic equilibrium.