Scopus-Indexed Open-Access Research on Social Welfare and Poverty Alleviation (2020-2025): A Focused Bibliometric Mapping
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Abstract
This study provides a focused bibliometric mapping of Scopus-indexed open-access journal articles that explicitly connect "social welfare" and "poverty alleviation." Rather than claiming exhaustive field coverage, the article maps a narrowly defined recent corpus. Data were retrieved from Scopus using the exact query “social welfare” AND “poverty alleviation” and processed in RStudio. After staged screening for topical relevance, document type, language, publication year, and open-access status, 40 journal articles indexed for 2020-2025 were retained. The analysis examines annual output, source distribution, citation visibility, collaboration patterns, and keyword-based themes. The results show a small but diverse corpus spread across 36 journals, with publication counts varying between three and ten articles per year. Citation visibility is concentrated in a limited number of papers, while collaboration appears fragmented across small author clusters. The thematic map suggests that China-related welfare and poverty governance form a central cluster within this corpus, whereas Indonesia- and climate-related work appear as developing topics. These findings should be interpreted as indicative of a focused Scopus subset rather than of the entire literature on welfare and poverty.
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References
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