Community development banks (CDB): a bibliometric analysis of the first 2 decades of scientific production

Abstract

This paper deals with a bibliometric analysis of 78 publications identified by the main academic search engines as concerning the topic of community development banks (CDB). The CDB phenomenon takes 2 decades, and some cases—such as the Brazilian Banco Palmas—have gained special attention. We tested two major hypotheses: (1) although the Brazilian origin of Banco Palmas, the socioeconomic development of the last 2 decades enlarged the interest of the topic to researchers from different nationalities; and (2) the collected researches focus on the community development and sustainability. The analysis made it possible to identify that in these 20 years, a great diversity of universities and nationalities of researchers have been associated with the focus of this research; in addition, the content analysis carried out on the titles and abstracts reinforces the connection of the CDB to the social economy, to the surrounding communities, and to microcredit.