Economic Sustainability of Agriculture-Based Entrepreneurs in the Rural Sector: A Bibliometric Analysis

The current study aims to identify the key topics, present situation, and dynamics in the field of economic sustainability of agri-based entrepreneurs in the rural sector and to make recommendations for future research studies. The main objective of the study is to synthesize the existing literature on the economic sustainability of agriculture-based entrepreneurs in the rural sector. The current study conducted a bibliometric analysis by selecting 147 studies from the Scopus database to determine the extent of research on the economic sustainability of agri-based entrepreneurs between 2015 and 2025. The study used only the Scopus database as it provides wider coverage of high-quality peer-reviewed journals in the fields of sustainability, agribusiness, and economics compared to other databases, and later extended the systematic review by integrating additional databases where full-text access is available. The collected data were analyzed using Biblioshiny software. In the current study, the most influential papers, leading researchers, geographical locations, number of publications, key journals, author affiliations, keywords, citation counts, and trend topics for future research were identified. Although some studies have been conducted on the economic sustainability of agri-based entrepreneurs at the global level, in the Sri Lankan context there are no significant research studies published in reputable journals indexed in the Scopus database. Therefore, this study attempts to address this research gap in the respective sector. The majority of the existing studies have employed a quantitative research approach. The results also indicate that this field is still emerging and offers significant opportunities for further exploration. Therefore, future researchers are encouraged to adopt more diverse methodological approaches, including qualitative and mixed-method designs, to gain deeper insights into the subject. According to the results of the current study, the identified trend topics include economic sustainability, economic viability, sustainability, agribusiness, and sustainable development. These themes provide important directions for future research and suggest the need for more context-specific and policy-oriented studies to strengthen theoretical and practical contributions in this area.