Abstract
Abstract Financial inclusion has become increasingly the focus of research and policy development globally because of its pivotal contribution towards encouraging economic engagement and sustainable development. This research provides a bibliometric analysis of financial inclusion studies over the past five decades (1972–2025) with a view to charting prominent thematic clusters, trends in publications, and top contributors in the area. By employing Biblioshiny and VOSViewer software over a dataset that was extracted from the Scopus database, it is revealed through the results that there is a rising trend in studies on financial inclusion publications, with China and India being dominant countries in research output. The top contributing institution was Makerere university business school, and the journal Sustainability (Switzerland) stood highest in publishing impactful articles. Co-occurrence and thematic analysis identify five prominent themes that are going to guide future academic debate: Financial Inclusion, Social Dimensions, and Technological Integration; Resource Efficiency; Development Goals, and Sustainability; Institutional Quality, Governance, and Regional Cooperation; Economic Resilience, Crisis Response, and Innovation; Niche Digital Finance and Performance Analysis. The results are useful to policymakers and researchers who want to further improve financial inclusion initiatives globally.