Trends and turning points of banking: a timespan view

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the banking industry has influenced by significant events such as deregulation, the advent of new technologies, the trend of globalization and financial crises. These events influenced the research areas of the field. This paper provides the study of an emerged timespan view of the development and evolution of banking literature from 1994 to 2017, during our explorations of literature from 1900 onward. It explores the changes, examines the conceptual orientations by the authors, and outlines the future study areas in the banking studies. We created a dataset of 8278 records of banking papers from Web of Science scientific citation indexing service. The results of scientometrics analysis of the articles indicate that banking literature falls into eight different coherent themes of study such as competition, debt, economies of scale, financial crises, credit, saving, banking in transition, and finance. Our findings show that among the eight emerged themes, the two study areas of financial crisis and competition are the youngest ones that will have a significant impact on the opening of future research avenues in banking studies.