Central bank digital currencies – a bibliometric analysis on research themes in pursuit of research trends

Purpose

This study aims to examine the characteristics of cross-border central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) while pinpointing research trends and adoption variables at both individual and macroeconomic levels. Additionally, it delves into the impact of terminology within CBDC-related scholarly literature themes.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors perform a bibliometric study using the metadata of academic papers about CBDC from ScienceDirect, Scopus and Web of Science (WoS), three reputable research databases. Word maps are produced using VOSviewer, an open-source bibliometric analytics program, to find pertinent and predominate words and phrases based on their frequency, placement, connection and co-occurrence. Additionally, the authors use the R programing language to assess the Jaccard similarity between bibliometric metadata and the financial terms in the Loughran-McDonald Master Dictionary (LMMD).

Findings

The study pinpoints the factors that affect CBDC adoption at the micro and macroeconomic levels. Insights into prospective future study themes are provided by the analysis of the metadata corpus, which shows significant and predominate words/phrases and themes in CBDC literature. Notably, the relatively low Jaccard similarity scores in the scholarly literature on CBDC-related topics across all three bibliometric databases suggest a restricted concentration on financial issues. This shows that CBDC research is still in its early stages and that there are still many undiscovered financial aspects.

Originality/value

The identification of literature’s themes using dominant and pertinent words based on bibliometric metadata, considering factors such as frequency and co-occurrence, enriches the evolving field of meta-analysis. Additionally, the use of the Jaccard index to assess the coverage of financial terms within bibliometric metadata represents a unique approach, shedding light on the distinctive aspects of CBDC research.