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Article

Scientometrics of Poverty Research for Sustainability Development: Trend Analysis of the 1964–2022 Data through Scopus

1
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Khon Kaen University, Khon Kaen 40002, Thailand
2
School of Government, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2022, 14(9), 5339; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14095339
Submission received: 15 March 2022 / Revised: 25 April 2022 / Accepted: 27 April 2022 / Published: 28 April 2022
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Competences for a Sustainable Society)

Abstract

:
Over the last six decades, significant progress has been made in studying poverty. Poverty research is an important issue for ensuring the sustainable development and governance of the world, especially the lower-income regions. More attention from multiple dimensions shall be paid to poverty research. However, apart from a few research publications, less research has investigated their citations using the most widely used approach for citation mapping—Scientometric analysis. Therefore, this research utilized 319 published papers on poverty research from 1964 to 20 February 2022, from the Scopus database to conduct bibliometric and social network analysis. The bibliometrix package in R and the VOSviewer program were used to perform data analysis and visualization. Theme mapping, trend themes, bibliometric coupling, and co-occurrence networks were utilized to discover potential study areas for existing and future trends. The findings reveal that poverty research has increased by 10.18% each year since 2006. Additionally, the results indicate the most influential sections of the research based on the most often mentioned subjects, papers, authors, and keywords. The findings indicate that future studies should focus on the poverty line, social policies, and living standards. The contributions of the paper may provide a reference to the understanding of poverty research through bibliometric analysis and promote poverty research in theory and practice.

1. Introduction

The United Nations Committee on Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights by Baderin and McCorquodale [1] has defined poverty as “a human condition characterized by sustained or chronic deprivation of the resources, capabilities, choices, security, and power necessary for the enjoyment of an adequate standard of living and other civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights”. The fundamental Sustainable Development Goal is to “End Poverty in all its manifestations worldwide”. Each country in the world is committed to eradicating poverty, ensuring that all people, including the poor and vulnerable, have equal access to economic resources, healthy living conditions, and basic infrastructure and technology [1,2,3,4,5]. Furthermore, there should be no question that developing countries and people are more sensitive to environmental degradation than the wealthy. Statista report that there are 1.3 billion people living in multidimensional poverty in 101 countries—23% of the population [6]. These data are derived from a person’s earnings and the extent to which they can satisfy their most basic requirements. According to the World Bank, 9.2% of the world’s population lives in poverty on less than USD 1.90 a day. Multidimensional poverty is defined as a lack of access to health, education, and living standards for individuals in 107 developing countries, according to the United Nations Development Program 2020 study [7].
Poverty reduction is an important approach to build a human community with a shared future and ensure sustainable development of the whole world and among different regions. There are many international organizations such as the World Bank for financial products and technical assistance for countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) for expanding universal health coverage, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for defeating hunger who are continually undertaking efforts to solve poverty problems [8,9,10]. On the other hand, many researchers paid attention to the poverty research issues over time, for instance, poverty research agenda, rural poverty, urban poverty, child poverty, etc. However, the previous research lacks in the provision of a systematic survey and analysis on the poverty research from a bibliometric analysis perspective [11]. Poverty affects certain stages of everyone’s life, either from personal experience, in a relationship, or knowing someone struggling [12]. Coping with Poverty in Rural Secondary Education inspires one to seek solutions for others facing the same problem. Situations that lead to poverty can be caused by problems between generations or out-of-control population groups [13], while later generations struggle with poverty. Guidelines and research on these issues must be flexible to meet the needs of all [14]. Since poverty has a significant impact on life and education, research questions must be proposed, and research efforts must be conducted to find the answers. Candidates for research in this area must explore the views of researchers concerning previously studied issues when there is sufficient data readiness status to encourage research enthusiasm. This could be used in later studies to alleviate the pressures caused by poverty. Understanding the definitions of key research areas will help deepen one’s knowledge of the poverty research topic.
Bibliometric analysis on the poverty research can provide a clarified and visualized understanding of the development of poverty research, referring to topics, paper productions, future trends, and so forth. Therefore, this research was conducted from the perspective of bibliometric analysis. This kind of research is beneficial for understanding the research situation over time and providing reference to future research both in theoretical and practical perspectives. This study has four main research questions: Which publications, authors, and countries have made the most extensive contributions to poverty research? What are the fundamental research strands, and how have essential values on the issue evolved? What are the gaps in the research on poverty over the study period? What are the significant concerns and trends occurring or that may arise in the next few years? This research is purely based on the Scopus database. The Scopus database holds numerous papers on poverty research findings that have been published during the previous six decades.
According to the authors’ survey, less previous studies have recognized research trends, developed networks of collaboration, or identified the most productive authors and publications in the subject of poverty research scientifically. In comparison, most review papers employed a subjective method for identifying research topics. This research aims to employ bibliometric analysis to discriminate among many approaches for detecting research gaps and trends, and therefore to identify the most potential topics or issues for poverty research development. Bibliometric analysis is a quantitative study that methodically looks at various features of published works [15,16,17,18]. Numerous forms of analysis exist, including geographic, author, and journal analysis. As a result, bibliometric analysis has been demonstrated to be beneficial for analyzing present and future improvements across various domains such as energy, earth science, medicine, engineering, and mathematics [17,18,19,20].
The rest of the article is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses the methods utilized, while Section 3 discusses the examination of bibliometric results. Section 4 discusses the significance, limits, knowledge gaps, and future research. Section 5 ends the paper with research conclusions.

2. Materials and Methods

Many scientometric approaches including structured reviews, model/framework reviews, meta-analysis, theoretical examination, future hybrid research, frameworks, and bibliometric reviews are widely used in different fields [20]. This study analyzed the literature on poverty researchers’ performance using a bibliometric technique. Bibliometric analysis is a well-acknowledged and commonly used scientific approach. It uses mathematical and statistical methods to evaluate publications [21]. The bibliometric approach based on citation mapping may be used to statistically summarize the study subject and offer insight into its primary research streams [19].
This study relied on the Scopus database to collect and analyze the relevant documents because Scopus holds a greater quantity of research publications on multidiscipline subjects than the Web of Science (WoS) database [22,23]. Additionally, the aggregate documents and citations from the two databases are well connected, and the bibliometric analysis findings between the two databases are not significantly different (Zhao et al., 2018). The investigation period covered by this study is between 1964 and 2022. The search parameters ‘All years (1964–2022)’ and ‘All documents’ were used to ensure that no significant materials were omitted. Figure 1 shows the used criteria [24] to select documents and the steps involved in the investigation process.
There are different bibliometric analysis tools such as Scimat, Sci2, Citespace, and VOSviewer. This study used R and VOSviewer together, which work well for the bibliometric analysis of academic papers from databases with visualization graphs on thematic, trends, citation network, etc. An R package called ‘Biblioshiny’ was used to conduct the bibliometric analysis [25] and to visualize similarities in the VOSviewer program [26]. Figure 1 illustrates the stage of this study at which the search term (‘poverty’ OR ‘poverty research’) in the field of “Subject” was initially used, resulting in 35,693 items. Then, these documents were narrowed down using the search term “poverty” or “poverty research” in the field of “Title”, which were filtered to 319 English-language documents. Additionally, it excluded inappropriate findings for the subject areas and included information gaps based on the bibliometric analysis, including 211 papers, 12 conference articles, 31 note/review articles, 2 editorial/erratum articles, and 63 book/book chapter articles.
Knowledge-based research gaps in poverty research were determined by the analysis on the following five main components: (i) articles and citations published; (ii) authors, institutions, nations, and resources of influence; (iii) subjects’ conceptual frameworks; (iv) a framework for the study of a variety of related subjects; and (v) social framework of the scholar collaboration-related research topics. Each component is measured by the number of publications, citations, co-citations, keywords, and the most productive authors, sources, countries, and institutions.

3. Results

3.1. General Information

Among the 319 documents selected for this study, 611 authors were identified, with only 131 authors of single-authored documents (21.44%). Each document has an average of 1.92 authors. The average number of citations per document is 17.65, which is highly regarded in academia. These figures indicate that collaboration between researchers from many fields is essential due to the topic’s multidisciplinary characteristics. Table 1 summarizes the general information about the investigated papers in this study.

3.1.1. Publication Output

Figure 2 shows a significant increase in the number of research articles published over the previous decades, indicating the academic community’s growing interest. The annual growth rate has grown from 1 to 37 documents in 1964 alone. It may be deduced that poverty research has been studied for a long time from publishing studies, with one piece published in each period: 1964–1965, 1976–1980, and 1986–1991. The Scopus database has 319 documents spanning barely 60 years. This trend is expected to continue through 2022 and into the future.

3.1.2. Discipline-Wise Analysis

Figure 3 shows that poverty research has been extensively studied in the journal SOCIAL INDICATORS RESEARCH (9); the second is EMPIRICAL POVERTY RESEARCH IN A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE and POVERTY: A GLOBAL REVIEW (6); and the third most relevant journal is JOURNAL OF POVERTY (5) (except for other journal groups).
The chart in Figure 3 illustrates the articles published by each publication in order of their importance to poverty research. Additionally, the data indicates the most frequently published journals and papers, ranging from 0 to 20.

3.1.3. The Leading Countries and Institutions

The world’s leading countries and institutions were analyzed as part of the quest. The United States of America (USA) is revealed to be the most productive country, with 148 total publications (TPC). The next is the United Kingdom (UK) (TPC, 118) and followed by Germany (TPC, 35). Figure 4 includes a list of other top nations. The UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD in the UK leads the top 10 institutions with a total publication index (TPI) of 10, followed by the UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE and UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES in the UK with 8 TPI. Other distinguished institutions are shown in Table 2.

3.2. Analyses of Bibliometric Performance

3.2.1. The Publication and Citation Trend

Based on the data analysis, publications increased at an annual average rate of 14.17% during the previous six decades (1964–2022). Schorr (1964) published the first essay on responses to a culture of poverty, according to the Scopus database. Although this is not a primary area of research interest, his advice was used in this research. The civil rights movement showed that there may be unacknowledged favorable attitudes embedded in the culture of poverty, which was a key motivator for the field’s early researchers.
The number of publications and the average total of citations per document and year is depicted in Figure 5. Since 1964, the journal’s articles have grown dramatically in response to the growing demand for poverty research between 1995 and 2000. There is no explanation for the approximately 60-year delay in scholarly publication on this subject. In 1995, studies concentrated on field research, which increased the number of scientific publications [27,28,29,30]. The average total of citations per document peaked in 2000 and has subsequently begun to wane in popularity. It might be because similar articles have risen significantly in recent years, or a few studies have significantly contributed to material volume. This indicates that the study in this domain expanded rapidly but was halted due to missing research gaps. After 2000, the average value of citations each year varied.

3.2.2. The Effect of the Source

This section discusses the most significant and influential sources of poverty research. The Scopus dataset obtained 1659 documents from 496 separate document sources, such as journals. The above Figure 3 illustrates the distribution of the top 20 most relevant sources. According to the number of publications, SOCIAL INDICATORS RESEARCH, with nine publications, is ranked as the top, followed by EMPIRICAL POVERTY RESEARCH IN A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE (6) and POVERTY: A GLOBAL REVIEW (6). The Bradford’s Law identified only the six journals (SOCIAL INDICATORS RESEARCH to BETWEEN THE SOCIAL AND THE SPATIAL: EXPLORING THE MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS OF POVERTY AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION) in the above Figure 3 as the core sources (zone 1) of poverty research documents [31]. The accumulative publication frequency of zone 1 is 107 (33.54%). Considering all the bibliometric indicators such as several publications, total citations, growth, h-index, and g-index, the SOCIAL INDICATORS RESEARCH journal scores as the top source as presented in Table 3. Considering the m-index, SOCIAL INDICATORS RESEARCH takes fourth place. It is revealed that journals such as SOCIAL INDICATORS RESEARCH, EMPIRICAL POVERTY RESEARCH IN A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE, and POVERTY: A GLOBAL REVIEW began publishing earlier than most other journals on this subject.

3.2.3. The Most Impactful Authors

Bibliometric Citation Analysis is a valuable technique for determining an author’s productivity when it comes to document publication. The top authors’ documents on poverty study analysis over the years are depicted in Figure 6. The color intensity in Figure 6 is proportional to the year of the citation, and the bubble size represents the various authors’ relative yearly output. For example, in 1998, SAUNDERS P obtained around 0.68 citations per year, and he published poverty documents nine times between 1998 and 2018. NA NA, SAUNDERS P, and TVEDTEN I are the three authors who have made the most significant contributions to the field throughout the years.
Additionally, SAUNDERS P is the most influential author in this research field, with an h-index of 5, a g-index of 9, and a total of 125 citations, following that are LIU Y (h-index 3, g-index 3, total citations 140) and MORGEN S (h-index 3, g-index 3, number of publications 3, total citations 174).

3.2.4. The Most Impactful Documents

By analyzing the amount and authority of referenced literature, document analysis identified the knowledge area’s intellectual structure. Scopus’s top 10 most referenced publications are listed in Table 4, with worldwide citation counts ranging from 99 to 538. O’Connor [32], Kalichman et al. [33], and Dercon and Krishnan [34] earn the most worldwide citations, receiving 538, 400, and 255, respectively, and their papers are listed as the top three most referenced publications. O’Connor [32] described how knowledge is constructed and can become food for ideology and political manipulation once constructed. Thus used (or abused) knowledge shapes both the institutions (i.e., policies, procedures, and eligibility standards) and the broader cultural meanings associated with the concept of poverty. Kalichman et al. [33] reported on research conducted in southern Africa, and their studies confirmed an association between alcohol use and sexual risks for HIV. Sexual risk reduction interventions are needed for men and women who drink, and these interventions should be targeted at alcohol-serving establishments. Dercon and Krishnan [34] explored the short-run variability further. They used a data set on a panel of 1450 households in different communities in rural Ethiopia, surveyed thrice over 18 months. The results imply that more households are vulnerable to shocks than the standard poverty statistics. In contrast, some of the nonpoor are included in these statistics, otherwise poor households temporally are boosting their consumption as an optimal response to seasonal incentive changes.

3.2.5. Bibliometric Coupling of Documents

Bibliometric coupling evaluates prior researchers’ writing on a subject, identifies significant ideas, and illustrates the character of the scholarly argument. Figure 7 depicts a scientific map that identifies critical documents (impact) and their relationships (centrality) using k-means clustering as an unsupervised learning algorithm to solve clustering problems for clustering analysis. It follows a procedure of classifying a given data set into several clusters defined by the fixed beforehand “k” [35]. This study selected all 319 papers with a cluster frequency of coupling at least 10% as determined by references. The document’s effect was quantified by the number of worldwide citations. Five clusters were created depending on the topic’s significance, each with a distinct color scheme of red, purple, green, yellow, and blue. Among these, the red cluster with a centrality of 0.400, an impact of 1.010, and 77 documents, Butler and Sherriff [36] contribute to the pursuit of methodological innovation in fuel poverty research with normalized local citations of 1.89, followed by Chzhen et al. [37] with normalized local citations of 1, and Khiatani et al. [38] with normalized local citations of 1. The study applied an adapted Family Stress Model (FSM) [39] to analyze the relationship between child material deprivation and intra-family conflict about money, using a nationally representative survey of children in England in 2018. The study explored the salient characteristics of families experiencing child poverty in Hong Kong by analyzing two representative cross-sectional datasets from the 2011 Population Census and 2016 By-Census. Specifically, to identify trends in child poverty rates and the risk factors underlying these trends, the relative importance of personal demographic, parental, and household characteristics in predicting the likelihood of experiencing child poverty in 2011 and 2016 was explored with samples of 41,265 and 40,127 children aged under 15, respectively.
O’Connor [40], Katherine et al. [41], and Yang et al. [42] are found to be the prominent authors in the blue cluster with a centrality of 0.342, an impact of 1.016, and 62 documents. Their research interests included the literature reviewed points toward a reformulated research agenda built around inequality, political economy, and stratification by gender, race, class, and place. It also called into question the traditional distinction between welfare and working poor and the notion of an isolated underclass existing apart from the social and economic mainstream. Their study built on research demonstrating that sub-regions within the USA have different processes that abet poverty and spatially differentiate child poverty. Additionally, the study demonstrated and analyzed the role of livelihood education in introducing Western civilization and Christian ideas to China’s labor class. YMCA night schools helped ordinary Chinese working people acquire basic life skills on a secular level, enabling them to enter a higher class in society and influence and reshape their beliefs.
The green cluster with a centrality of 0.478, an impact of 1.307, and 47 documents, contains documents by Greve [43], Saunders and Naidoo [44], Hallerd [41], and others. Their goal was to estimate the incidence of deprivation and compare the results with those produced using a conventional poverty framework. This is further combined with presenting many typologies and methods to analyze existing welfare arrangements, their changes over time, and the diversity of approaches worldwide. Given that welfare and welfare states are often connected with the more affluent countries around the globe, they occupy a more central position in the presentation. The analysis presented in the article is based on two different concepts of poverty: the direct consensual definition developed by Mack and Lansley [45] and the indirect consensual definition established by Godehart et al. [46]. The distinction between indirect and direct definitions of poverty is well established within poverty research.
The purple cluster with a centrality of 1.188, the impact of 1, and 4 documents, contains documents by Meng et al. [47], De Boyser et al. [48], Roelen et al. [49], and others. Their goal was to determine which demonstrates the potential to understand better specific social characteristics, including occupation and inequality between urban greenery and open spaces, and investigate their relationship with urban poverty. The use of street view images, percentage, and aggregation indicators were proposed to estimate the occupation and inequality between human-perception-based greenery and open spaces. Accordingly, the relationship between human perception and urban poverty was analyzed using Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR). Researchers studying the ‘social’ and ‘spatial’ dimensions of poverty have only started to challenge and explore the boundaries of each other’s research perspectives and instruments. Their research distilled a generic construction process from analyzing existing child poverty approaches, presenting a tool for such approaches’ precise and transparent development. It was then applied to the case of Vietnam, using household survey data to illustrate its practical use and develop a Vietnam-specific child poverty approach.
Finally, documents by Liu and Ye [50], Yarbrough [51], Iwasaki [52], and others are included in the yellow cluster with a centrality of 0.352, an impact of 1.023, and 60 documents. Their unifying goal was to study, focusing on the Dongtai community in Dongguan city, the dynamic territorial politics of the government, market, and civil society in the urban grassroots of China. Protest events against research “Nothing About Us Without Us” occurred between 2012 and 2015 and targeted academic researchers and policymakers. Their research article analyzed protests that activists identify as oppressive knowledge production by “outsiders” who are not sex workers or homeless. The authors drew lessons from marginalized groups’ protests against knowledge production by outsider “experts” to present three problems with traditional poverty research: pathologization, paternalism, and extractive exotification. For instance, Iwasaki [52] successfully presented the general conclusions of core research subjects in transition economy through a meta-analysis of the existing literature with chaotic research contents.

3.2.6. Trend Topics

Analysis of authors’ keyword usage in publications is a critical technique for determining current trends and the areas of specialization of academics. Keywords in a publication’s title are used to quickly identify its topic and focus. Topics occurred due to the phrase frequency discovered in this most common sequence of words in research. According to the following timeline, the terms shown in Figure 8 are the most commonly cited topics. The most frequently used keywords appear first on the list, and their occurrence points are depicted in the timeline. Figure 8 illustrates the topic’s evolution from 1985 when it had a meteoric ascent. According to the timeline, social capital was the most often discussed topic in 2005, followed by the poverty line in 2009. Social exclusion, collective action, and poverty reduction gained attention in 2012. It began to explore poverty research topics that became popular in 2013. Between 2018 and 2021, energy poverty, urban poverty, rural poverty, child poverty, multi-dimensional poverty, and poverty alleviation were widespread in the poverty research domain.

3.2.7. Thematic Map

This study investigated a theme map by dividing it into four topic quadrants based on density and centrality, as seen in Figure 9. The issues in the right upper quadrant should be examined and researched deeper due to their density and centrality. In comparison, the left upper quadrant has a distinct, unusual, but rapidly developing subject with a high density and low centrality. The left lower quadrant contains motifs with a downward trend, whereas the right lower quadrant contains fundamental themes with a high centrality but low density. Figure 9 illustrates that the poverty line, social policy, and living standards are the most promising areas for future research.

3.2.8. Conceptual Framework and Research Foundations

Thematic evolution is becoming an effective technique in bibliometrics for offering a historical perspective on research and a science-based paradigm for directing future research prospects [53]. It highlights the most significant research themes and charts theme evolution through time, offering insight into the field’s future path [54]. From 1964 to 2022, Figure 10 illustrates the progression of the 19 most frequently used terms in poverty study materials based on the co-occurrence network. The map of thematic progression was generated by clustering the word network, which represents domain-specific themes. Based on the volume of public papers, two periods were chosen as cut-off points: 2013 and 2014.
As shown in Figure 10, “keywords plus” is used to provide a more relatively comprehensive understanding of the keywords corresponding to paper contents. The size of the boxes in Figure 10 indicates the frequency of keyword appearance and themes. From 1964 to 2013, the most popular words were ‘international poverty research’, ‘poverty research agenda’, ‘poverty research limitations implications’, ‘rural poverty research’, and followed by ‘urban poverty research’ which were then merged into the next time slice (2014–2022) as ‘poverty research limitations implications’, ‘international poverty research’, ‘urban poverty research’, ‘rural poverty research’, ‘poverty research agenda’, ‘child poverty research’, and ‘American poverty research’, respectively. This demonstrates that ‘urban poverty research’ and ‘poverty research agenda’ have changed into a new form known as ‘poverty research limitations implications’, owing to their constant attraction for authors. The term ‘poverty research limitations implications’ is separated into two branches in the next time slice (2014–2022): ‘rural poverty research’ and ‘poverty research’, whereas ‘international poverty research’ is classified into two branches: ‘international poverty research’ and ‘child poverty research’. Since 2014, these keywords have certainly been hot topics. The term ‘poverty research’ often appears in papers from all historical periods. Regardless, the topic evolution map identifies ‘rural poverty research’ as the leading focus of scientists’ attention for the time slice 2014–2022, followed by ‘rural poverty research’ and ‘American poverty research’.

3.2.9. Analyses of Co-Citation Networks

The co-citation map illustrates the scientific structure of any body of literature by the frequency of joint mention of two publications in a third document [55]. This study covers a total of 17,866 citations in poverty research materials. This study chose citations mentioned at least five times, and the co-citation analysis was conducted on 50 articles in the field of poverty research. The Louvain method was used to cluster the selected citations to reveal a poverty research study’s structure and theoretical underpinnings [56]. An article’s normalized number of citations is represented by the size of its node, while the line thickness shows the co-citation’s interaction strength between the nodes in the graph. Their link and proximity show the relationship between the two items. The color of the box indicates the article’s cluster. The nodes that have the same hue are clustered together. According to Figure 11, each box is labeled with the name of the article’s first author and year of publication.
As shown in Table 5, the network of co-citations is separated into three clusters. The grouping is based on the most included references. All three groups are connected by a single critical concept of poverty research that serves as the theoretical underpinning for this study.
The first cluster (red) shows the extent of poverty research in the UK and explains its existing setups [57]. They describe a measure of poverty (subjective measures). Subjective poverty lines continue to adapt over time, depending on the social reference group (e.g., when older people’s living conditions improve, they respond with a higher minimum necessary income) and the reference period (e.g., in a crisis period, aspirations might decline). The issue with utilizing benefit levels as income criteria is that when they are increased in real terms, the numbers become impoverished. The problem with thresholds based on average or median income is that they are arbitrary cut-off points in the income distribution—in other words, they are a measure of inequality. The majority of economic poverty indicators are measures of income disparity rather than poverty. The second cluster (blue) is poverty and family structure: the widening gap between evidence and public policy issues. Wilson and Neckerman [58] demonstrated that social scientists could not adequately account for racial and ethnic disparities in marriage after decades of heated discussion. Given their stark contrasts, the marital patterns of white and black women have garnered much attention. The empirical evidence most strongly supports theories for the black–white marriage disparity that incorporates labor market inequities and other structural disadvantages faced by black individuals, particularly black men. These theories are based on well-established demographic considerations regarding the affordability of marriage and gender inequalities in the number of men and women available for marriage. Sociologists William Julius Wilson and Kathryn Neckerman theorized in their highly influential book of 1987, The Truly Disadvantaged, that black women’s low marriage rates in the 1970s and 1980s resulted from a shortage of marriageable males. The third cluster (green) discusses moving away from the methodological questions posed by the other contributors and points to another irony evident in poverty research and action—the diversity of concepts versus the uniformity of strategies for poverty eradication. Sen [59] noted that political and ideological climate changes pose significant challenges in conceptualizing and implementing anti-poverty strategies.

3.2.10. Author Collaboration Network

The author cooperation network is vital for comprehending research directions in various study disciplines [60]. This partnership frequently establishes academic centers that foster research areas’ growth and future extension. The co-author network depicted in Figure 12 reveals the intellectual ties between scholars on a country-by-country basis [61]. According to co-authorship, Figure 12 indicates the nation contributing the largest and most significant number of citations to the development of poverty research. From 15 separate nations, with a cut-off point of 5 publications and 1 citation, 40 countries reach the threshold point with 5 clusters, 26 linkages, and a total link strength of 38. The diameter of the circle represents a country’s total number of publications. The line thickness and circle spacing indicate the degree of participation. The whole strength of a country’s ties is determined by the number of papers produced by authors representing two or more nations.
In poverty research, four main networks have emerged, which are led by the USA (red cluster), the UK (green cluster), the Netherlands (blue cluster), Spain (yellow cluster), and Sweden (purple cluster). Within these countries, poverty research using the USA case, race-related power relations have created a context in which African Americans suffer disproportionately from social, economic, and political marginalization, if not outright exclusion. The UK (link strengths 14) is the most influential country in poverty research collaborating with the USA (link strengths 12). The research integrated the multi-disciplinary fields of Quality of Life (QoL) and Well-Being (WB) and appraised health factors’ impacts. Theoretical and methodological limitations were discussed, and new conceptual and technical advances were identified. These were informed by cross-cultural and community perspectives. Their social inequalities and links with happiness were examined following a definitional review. Demographic, experiential, and personal factors were outlined. Finally, implications for poverty research were addressed. The red cluster countries focus their efforts on urban poverty and welfare-state restructuring due to the emergence of neoliberalism, particularly the rise in market-oriented ideas about social worth, productivity, and investment, which have come to dominate civic life and public policy. They are mainly concerned with the United States of America, but not exclusively. They examined five methodologies or themes in anthropological studies of welfare restructuring in the United States of America, following a brief overview of four theoretical frameworks that underpin ethnographic research on welfare. A significant focus in this field is the ethnographic examination of poverty and the social reproduction of low-income families, which reveals a crisis in welfare reform that is in stark contrast to the dominant discourse. Another critical aspect of ethnography is the consideration of race, ethnicity and, to a lesser extent, class [62].
Countries focus on investigating the relationships between rural poverty, risk, and development from the green cluster. Building upon the author’s work in the area, it summarized the contributions of recent theoretical and empirical work to understand how risk affects rural poverty levels in developing countries. In particular, the author examined what to do and what people do not know about risk-coping strategies in today’s poor rural societies. Governments and international organizations proposed how these strategies may be re-examined and improved [63]. The authors in the blue cluster had similar discussions on the quality of poverty-related studies. In contrast, they discovered a substantial degree of seasonal and year-to-year variation in food consumption and poverty. According to econometric research, consumption is impacted by idiosyncratic and standard shocks, such as rainfall and household-specific crop failure. Families also take advantage of the seasonal incentives provided by the shifting work market and rising prices [20]. In the yellow cluster, their research has highlighted the ambiguity of these claims across various dimensions and scales, focusing on ethanol production, oilseed crops on agricultural lands, or Jatropha-type crops on common lands. They studied the agronomic and economic viability and livelihood impacts of Jatropha curcas plantations on private farms in Tamil Nadu, India [64]. With several partnerships over different periods, the publishing weight has increased exponentially. The most productive organization, for example, is the poverty research institute at the University of Oxford in the UK, with a link score of 3, link strength of 10, and 10 collaboration documents, followed by the University of Cambridge in the UK.

4. Discussion

The investigation conclusions have a multiplicity of practical and theoretical significance. To begin, it provides a comprehensive historical overview of poverty studies over the previous six decades. Second, it emphasizes the literature’s most influential and productive authors, publications, and nations. This might serve as a good foundation for researchers interested in determining which nations to undertake advanced research in and where to submit their findings for publication. Third, academics will be able to concentrate their attention on the most significant and influential articles and the most recent ones.
Fourth, academics working in collaboration with social developers and data scientists might utilize the findings of this study to identify research subjects that address the gaps revealed in this study. For instance, further research is needed to perform in-depth assessments of financial literacy and access to finance integrated with poverty studies. Similarly, a research deficit highlighted in the documents as relative poverty study is a dynamic, multi-faceted, and regional issue. In the new era, it is vital to undertake multidimensional measurements of each location and provide long-term matching processes. Additionally, a few publications have been published in recent years that address poverty research from a sustainable and economic perspective. Thus, other research vacuums exist on this subject, and further in-depth research on poverty with an emphasis on sustainability and cost–benefit analysis for developing nations or rural populations might be conducted. Fifth, scholars should undertake more research on the knowledge management theory and conceptual framework to deal with acute problems in various dimensions. For instance, in the medical field, Vuong et al. classified the COVID-19 vaccines production process with the employment of the serendipity-mindsponge-3D creativity management theory [65]. Moreover, public and government attitudes toward science are critical to the country’s development. This dilemma is exacerbated in low-income regions, limiting the impact of scientific study on poverty. The investments in basic research in developing countries such as Vietnam were still less than the investments in developed countries. Therefore, the developing countries shall strongly support the value of science as a foundation for technological advances, innovations, and development in transition economies [66].
However, this study also has shortcomings, including the reliance on the Scopus database only to locate relevant papers. Additionally, other documents were excluded due to a lack of pertinent information. Other significant academic repositories, such as the Web of Science (WoS), Dimension, and PubMed, may be leveraged in future research projects to conduct mixed reviews and give a more comprehensive qualitative and quantitative summary of the research front on this issue. The benefits of the procedures in terms of scope are offset by their shortcomings in the in-depth examination. It was challenging to perform a more rigorous examination of the research issue without investigating the specific approaches and models at the beginning. Because of this, bibliometric techniques tend to focus more on outputs than the content of the articles.

5. Conclusions

Continuous development to solve the poverty problem through research has numerous facets. The growth in volume, diversity, and veracity of poverty alleviation results in overcoming existing poverty limitations. The poverty research documents in the Scopus database are excellent sources of bibliometric analysis that can be utilized before conducting poverty alleviation studies. This bibliometric method provides the present state of the art and future trends in poverty research by analyzing the most published papers (319) and the most extended period of study (1964–2022). The paper analyzed the most productive and influential authors, institutions, nations, journals, and publishing trends on the subject through time using bibliometric approaches. To sum up, this paper provides a data analysis perspective with visualization for the comprehensive handling and understanding of the poverty situation. From the analysis on the countries, paper productions, themes, citation networks, and trends, the poverty research can be broadened and deepened in the future, with a positive effect on the public, educational, rural, governmental, and national development among the regions overall of the world, especially for the developing countries [66].
According to the results of scientific mapping of bibliometric data, such as the co-citation network, bibliometric coupling network, and co-authorship network, the poverty research literature is separated into three core subfields: the poverty line, social policy, and a living standard. Additionally, the findings showed that ‘SOCIAL INDICATORS RESEARCH’ is the most influential journal on poverty research in this field, followed by ‘EMPIRICAL POVERTY RESEARCH IN A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE’ and ‘POVERTY: A GLOBAL REVIEW’. According to citations and publications, Peter Saunders writing The Poverty Wars: Reconnecting Research with Reality is the most productive author in this field, considering the h-index and g-index and the amount of time spent contributing to this research domain. The most frequently cited article in the collection is “Poverty knowledge” by Alice O’Connor [29]. The most often used keyword is ‘poverty,’ followed by ‘poverty research’ and ‘child poverty’. The United States of America is the most productive country in this area in terms of publications and citations, followed by the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Germany. The United Kingdom is the most collaborative century with 10 links and 14 link strengths, followed by the United States with 12 connection strengths. Additionally, this assessment indicated that the Netherlands and Belgium, the United Kingdom and Germany, the United States of America and Germany, and the United States of America and South Africa jointly shared three papers.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, W.C. and C.L.; methodology, W.C.; software, W.C.; validation, C.L.; formal analysis, W.C.; investigation, C.L.; resources, W.C. and C.L.; data curation, W.C. and C.L.; writing—original draft preparation, W.C.; writing—review and editing, C.L.; visualization, W.C.; supervision, W.C.; project administration, W.C.; funding acquisition, W.C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

This research was funded by Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Khon Kaen University, Thailand, grant number HUSO-2565.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

Not applicable.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Figure 1. Methodology for article selection and analysis process.
Figure 1. Methodology for article selection and analysis process.
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Figure 2. Publication output.
Figure 2. Publication output.
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Figure 3. Distribution of documents across publication titles.
Figure 3. Distribution of documents across publication titles.
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Figure 4. Top 10 countries and institutions.
Figure 4. Top 10 countries and institutions.
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Figure 5. Publication and citation history on poverty research.
Figure 5. Publication and citation history on poverty research.
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Figure 6. Top authors’ production of poverty research from 1976 to 2020.
Figure 6. Top authors’ production of poverty research from 1976 to 2020.
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Figure 7. Bibliometric coupling of documents.
Figure 7. Bibliometric coupling of documents.
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Figure 8. Topic timeline.
Figure 8. Topic timeline.
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Figure 9. Thematic map.
Figure 9. Thematic map.
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Figure 10. Thematic evolution of keywords plus.
Figure 10. Thematic evolution of keywords plus.
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Figure 11. Co-citation network of references.
Figure 11. Co-citation network of references.
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Figure 12. Co-authorship based on countries.
Figure 12. Co-authorship based on countries.
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Table 1. Summary of the descriptive information.
Table 1. Summary of the descriptive information.
DescriptionResultsDescriptionResults
Main Information DOCUMENT CONTENTS
Timespan1964:2022Keywords plus (ID)805
Sources (journals, books, etc.)236Author’s keywords (DE)667
Documents319AUTHORS
Average years from publication11.2Authors611
Average citations per document17.65Author appearances679
Average citations per year per doc1.43Authors of single-authored documents131
References1Authors of multi-authored documents480
DOCUMENT TYPES AUTHORS COLLABORATION
Article211Single-authored documents151
Book/book chapter63Documents per author0.522
Conference paper12Authors per document1.92
Editorial/erratum2Co-authors per document2.13
Note/review31Collaboration index2.86
Table 2. The top 10 institutions publishing articles.
Table 2. The top 10 institutions publishing articles.
AffiliationsDocuments
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD10
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE8
UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES8
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA7
UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL6
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON6
UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM5
UNIVERSITY OF ANTWERP5
UNIVERSITY OF YORK5
HARVARD UNIVERSITY4
Table 3. The effect of the sources.
Table 3. The effect of the sources.
Elementh-Indexg-Indexm-IndexTCNPPY Start
SOCIAL INDICATORS RESEARCH570.2387672002
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN SOCIAL POLICY440.14314741995
AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL ISSUES340.1434242002
INDOOR AND BUILT ENVIRONMENT330.5003432017
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL ECONOMICS340.2142642009
JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES330.13026532000
JOURNAL OF SOCIAL ISSUES340.0524841965
JOURNAL OF SOCIAL POLICY330.12011231998
POVERTY: A GLOBAL REVIEW340.1112051996
ANNUAL REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY220.0878022000
BETWEEN THE SOCIAL AND THE SPATIAL: EXPLORING THE MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS OF POVERTY AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION220.143722009
BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY220.1009622003
CHILDREN AND SOCIETY220.0952622002
CHILDREN AND YOUTH SERVICES REVIEW220.400822018
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL REVIEW220.333422017
EMPIRICAL POVERTY RESEARCH IN A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE250.5007652019
FORUM FOR DEVELOPMENT STUDIES220.100422003
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND PUBLIC HEALTH230.5001132019
JOURNAL OF CLEANER PRODUCTION220.5001622019
JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE FAMILY STUDIES220.0802021998
(Notes: TC = total citations; NP = number of publications: PY Stat: publication year start).
Table 4. Top 10 cited documents of poverty research.
Table 4. Top 10 cited documents of poverty research.
PaperDOITotal Citations
(TC)
TC per YearNormalized TC
O’CONNOR A, 2009, POVERTY KNOWL: SOCIAL SCI, SOCIAL POLICY, AND THE POOR IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY U S HISNA53838.428613.778
KALICHMAN SC, 2007, PREV SCI10.1007/s11121-006-0061-2400255.3537
DERCON S, 2000, J DEV STUD10.1080/0022038000842265325511.0871.6612
CAMFIELD L, 2008, J HEALTH PSYCHOL10.1177/135910530809386019613.06674.4
LAMONT M, 2008, THE COLORS OF POVER: WHY RACIAL AND ETHNIC DISPARITIES PERSISTNA17011.33333.8163
MORGEN S, 2003, ANN REV ANTHROPOL10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.0934311477.351.905
HALLERD B, 1995, J EUR SOC POLICY10.1177/0958928795005002031344.78572.6275
ARIZA-MONTOBBIO P, 2010, ECOL ECON10.1016/j.ecolecon.2010.05.011130104.3333
FAFCHAMPS M, 2003, RURAL POVERTY, RISK AND DEV10.4337/97817819506851266.31.6328
BRADY D, 2013, AM SOCIOL REV10.1177/0003122413501859999.95.7713
Table 5. Co-citation clusters as theoretical fundamentals.
Table 5. Co-citation clusters as theoretical fundamentals.
ClusterRelevant Citations
Cluster 1 (Red)Townsend P. 1979, Mack J. 1985, Ringen S. 1988, Ringen S. 1987, Nolan B. 1996, Sen A. 1976
Cluster 2 (Blue)Wilson W.J. 1987, O’Connor A. 2001, Murray C. 1984, Edin K. 1997, Liebow E. 1967, Stack C. 1974, Wilson W.J. 1996
Cluster 3 (Green)Sen A. 1999, Lister R. 2004
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Chansanam, W.; Li, C. Scientometrics of Poverty Research for Sustainability Development: Trend Analysis of the 1964–2022 Data through Scopus. Sustainability 2022, 14, 5339. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14095339

AMA Style

Chansanam W, Li C. Scientometrics of Poverty Research for Sustainability Development: Trend Analysis of the 1964–2022 Data through Scopus. Sustainability. 2022; 14(9):5339. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14095339

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Chansanam, Wirapong, and Chunqiu Li. 2022. "Scientometrics of Poverty Research for Sustainability Development: Trend Analysis of the 1964–2022 Data through Scopus" Sustainability 14, no. 9: 5339. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14095339

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