Towards Concise Reporting of Financial Stress: A Bibliometric Review of Eight Decades of Research

Financial stress is an unescapable global issue impacting millions, exacerbated by economic uncertainty, growing living costs, and income inequality. This stress affects individuals' mental and physical health, lowers productivity, and hinders societal progress. This study aims to determine a map of research in financial stress. The study was steered from 592 published documents from 1945 until 2024 interrelated to financial stress, have were included after several cleaning processes undertaken by the researchers. A bibliometric analysis was performed by absolute counts using Bibliometric BiblioShiny and Vos-viewer software. The results depicted that there is a continuous increase in the number of publications, especially for the period 2014 - 2024, which represents 83.17% of publications from earliest published paper in 1945. Most of the sources extracted from the Scopus Database were written in English language representing 581 total publications, while the other 11 publications were written in Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Czech, German and Italian. Amongst top highly cited documents were published in Journal of Financial Stability, Journal of Psychology and Aging, and Journal of Applied Mathematical Modelling. On the other hand, among the top countries contributing to financial stress publications are the United States, China and Australia. Finally, from bibliometrics results, this study provides an overview of global citation trends on financial stress. This study also attempts to determine the development of financial stress research, which can provide ground information to the researchers to attain an inclusive understanding of this field and can be a reference for application of financial stress visualization approaches.