Computational Bibliometric Analysis of Emerging Research Patterns in Informal Street Vending Systems

Abstract

Street vending employs about two billion informal workers globally, but the mechanisms that aim to integrate these workers through the use of financial instruments such as microfinance, financial inclusion, and digital payment adoption are not well organized within an interdisciplinary body of evidence. The present study seeks to address this lack of integration by employing computational bibliometric analysis to create a systematic overview of the intellectual structure, geographical distribution and thematic evolution of the scientific literature on the link between street vending and financial inclusion. After a PRISMA-based screening process, 331 Scopus-indexed sources were narrowed down to a final corpus of 226 peer-reviewed journal articles covering the period from 1989 to 2025. The corpus was then analyzed computationally using network visualization through VOSviewer (co-authorship, co-citation, and keyword co-occurrence mapping) and science mapping using the bibliometrix R package through Biblioshiny (country production, author productivity, Lotka's law fitting, thematic mapping, and logistic growth modeling). Findings reveal that scientific output is geographically concentrated in India and Malaysia, that authorship obeys Lotka’s Law with a small productive core headed by Abdullah Al Mamun (14 publications, h-index 9) and that the conceptual language of the field has developed in three distinct stages from the classical microfinance and poverty alleviation topics via the gender and structure of the informal sector topics to a present frontier of fintech and digitally-mediated financial inclusion. The logistic growth curve of the annual publication series (R² = 0.634; RMSE = 4.76) demonstrates that the field is developing from the stage of rapid growth towards maturity. It is clear that diversification of the geographical origins of the authors, South-South cooperation in the field, and further exploration of the digital aspects of the informal economy constitute the most promising avenues of development for the field.