Mapping the Evolution of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

As central banks worldwide increasingly explore the issuance and design of sovereign digital money, academic output on the topic has grown steadily and diversified across multiple research streams. This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of the expanding academic literature on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). Bibliometric techniques are applied to a Scopus-indexed dataset comprising 892 publications released between 2017 and 2025. Microsoft Excel and VOSviewer are employed for performance analysis and science-mapping visualization to analyzes the evolution of CBDC research, looking at elements such as its evolution in time, the geographical distribution of publications, as well as patterns of international collaboration. The findings provide a structured overview of the intellectual and institutional landscape of CBDC research and highlight emerging trends that indicate the consolidation of CBDCs as a stable and interdisciplinary research domain. The results reveal that CBDC research has evolved through distinct thematic phases, moving from early technological discussions toward more applied areas such as economic and macro-financial research, and more recently, towards areas such as governance and implementation challenges. Overall, the findings position CBDC research as an increasingly policy-relevant and empirically oriented field, characterized by growing convergence between academic research and institutional practice, and provides a set of areas for future research and policy development.