Ailen Laguda
Abstract Digital financial fraud and the financial-literacy defences meant to counter it have become a fast-growing, cross-disciplinary research concern, yet the conceptual and intellectual structure of this combined field has not been systematically mapped. This study presents a bibliometric analysis of research at the intersection of digital fraud susceptibility and financial literacy, using metadata retrieved from the open bibliographic database OpenAlex and analysed with VOSviewer. A dataset of 523 documents published between 2015 and 2026 was examined through publication-trend analysis, citation and source analysis, co-authorship analysis, term co-occurrence mapping, and bibliographic coupling. Annual output grew steeply, with roughly 60% of the corpus appearing in 2023–2025, indicating a young and rapidly expanding field. Co-occurrence mapping of 176 concepts produced six substantive thematic clusters: accounting, auditing and forensic controls; financial literacy and consumer psychology; artificial-intelligence and machine-learning fraud detection; digital payments, fintech and cyber-enabled fraud; law, regulation and consumer protection; and information security, privacy and identity. The digital-payments and fintech cluster was the most recent on average, and fintech, digital literacy, financial inclusion and blockchain surfaced as research fronts. Collaboration was highly fragmented, with no large connected co-authorship component, and direct-citation linkage within the corpus was sparse, although bibliographic coupling revealed greater thematic cohesion. The analysis charts the contours of an emerging field and identifies under-integrated areas—particularly the gap between behavioural financial-literacy research and technical fraud-detection research—that warrant coordinated attention. Limitations relating to the OpenAlex concept classifier and single-database coverage are discussed.