Business Bankruptcy in Romania: Insights from a Bibliometric Analysis

Business bankruptcy is a legal process with harmful repercussions for all stakeholders, starting with creditors and moving on to suppliers, workers, customers, and the entire community. Accordingly, the aim of our research was to assess the scientific literature on business bankruptcy in Romania using a quantitative research method, namely, a bibliometric analysis. This approach enabled us to describe, gauge, and monitor the scholars’ output on the Romanian business bankruptcy matter. To achieve our goal, we used the Web of Science (WoS) platform, where we searched for scientific documents by using the following topic keywords: (“bankruptcy” OR “insolvency” OR “business failure” OR “corporate failure” OR “company failure” OR “financial distress”) AND (“Romania” OR “Romanian”). Although our initial search query identified 189 scientific papers, we selected only studies in the fields of business and economics, resulting in 80 documents spanning from January 2005 to October 2025. Subsequently, the bibliometric analysis was performed in the R programming language. The main outcomes of our analysis revealed that (i) a total of 162 authors provided a notable contribution to the development of research on the topic of business bankruptcy in Romania (mostly of them affiliated with the Bucharest University of Economic Studies from Romania), (ii) most WoS-indexed documents (i.e., 13 articles) were published in 2014, (iii) the three-fields plot, word cloud, and co-occurrence network derived from author’s keywords shed light on the fact that scholars are engaged in investigating the challenges that may occur in business activities within Romanian territory (from minor to major ones) as well as how they can be timely foreseen by employing various types of statistical or machine learning methods on financial ratios or raw accounting indicators. All in all, the subject of bankruptcy warrants further study to anticipate potential bankruptcy risks, prevent capital losses, and address financial difficulties as effectively as possible at the earliest stage.