Overview of bond mutual funds : a systematic and bibliometric review

The focus of this review is to exhibit a thorough analysis of prominent aspects in bond funds literature and their conceptual developments employing the trending bibliometric analysis. The study was conducted using the Scopus database, which found 354 scholarly documents during a 40-year period spanning from 1982 to 2021, revealing that the amount of research within these fields has a limited presence in the academic literature. The authors, the publications, thematic groups, distribution of keywords, country of publication, trends, and the papers most frequently cited are examined to get an explicit view of the extant research. Thus, the present review identifies the existing knowledge base, examines it, and demonstrates the visualizing patterns to capture the fact-based insight into trending themes in the amphitheater of bond funds. The review further explicitly identifies three research fronts, i.e. performance measures, risk approaches, and bond fund flows. Finally, the findings of the study would be a virtue for researchers, practitioners, and academicians to proceed to further explore the area for an overview of trends and their empirical investigation.