Fifteen years of crowdfunding – a bibliometric analysis

ABSTRACT

Crowdfunding emerged as a flexible method of financing various projects during the financial crisis but has since developed into a fully fledged financing instrument that requires special attention from the academia and legislators. The purpose of this study is to perform a quantitative analysis of the up-to-date crowdfunding research employing bibliometric analysis. We have used data from the Scopus database and have extracted a number of 1951 research papers. Using VOSviewer software, we have looked into the yearly research production, the categories in which the studies fall, citation records, highly cited authors and papers, most prolific authors and country of origin in crowdfunding. We grouped keywords into clusters and identified emerging trends. We then revealed the thematic progression of the occurring keywords into four time ranges. We find that crowdfunding research has been growing steadily from 2006 to date, with a particular focus on business and finance. The most productive countries are highly developed economies, but other countries have started exploring crowdfunding, too. The most cited references are published between 2013 and 2016, which is when the bases of this stream of research have been established. We finally discuss the theoretical and practical implications.