Mapping Research Landscape: A Bibliometric Analysis on Green Finance, Financial Institutions, and SDG Financing in the GCC Memebr States

Abstract

This study offers one of the first attempts of systematic mapping of the scholarly landscape that links green finance, financial institutions, and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) financing across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) economies. Drawing on 227 peer-reviewed Web of Science articles published between 2014 and early 2025, identified through a targeted keyword string and filtered with strict inclusion criteria, it applies performance analysis and science-mapping techniques in Vosviewer and R studio to expose publication trends, intellectual structures, and collaboration networks. Results reveal an exponential rise in output from a single paper in 2014 to 89 by 2025 concentrated in 101 sources, with the Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment accounting for one-third of the corpus. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates dominate citation impact, yet international co-authorship exceeds 75 per cent, signaling an emergent transnational research community. Co-citation and keyword co-occurrence analyses identify eight thematic clusters centred on green sukuk pricing, ESG disclosure mandates, fintech enablement, and the evolving role of central banks. At the same time, they reveal only limited interaction between the monetary-policy and capital-market subfields.