The Historical Aspects of Social and Islamic Finance in Europe: Bibliometric Research

Abstract

In European Union countries, social finance is flourishing. Also, Islamic finance and banking for investment businesses, Islamic bond products, and other credit collection instruments have grown in Europe in recent years. We conduct a quantitative literature review of English-language publications from Scopus covering the period from 1990 through 2023 that focus on social finance and Islamic finance in Europe. We analyze the field’s evolution and structure, including co-citation, co-authorship, and bibliographical coupling, using a VOS viewer, a bibliometric approach, and content analysis. We find that the United Kingdom is the most relevant country, the University van Amsterdam is the most relevant institution, and Sustainability Switzerland is the most relevant journal. There are four main topics: (1) Health and well-being, (2) social housing finance and education in Europe, (3) Sustainability reporting, (4) Knowledge makes money go round, (5) social health insurance reexamined, (6) the role of the state in healthcare systems, and (7) Social learning.