Analyzing the research trends for letter of credit using science mapping

Letter of Credit has been used in international transfer of money by exporters and importers for a long time. Thus, it is a very niche and important area in the international trade and banking. Within the scope of this study, 220 publications in the Web of Science database has been reached by using “letter of credit” keywords. There is only one bibliometric analysis on Islamic L/C in the literature but a wider overview is required to gain general perspective about L/C. This is where the originality of this research lies. Bibliometric analysis with VOSviewer and Tableau for these publications covering 1980-2024 has been conducted about citations, organizations, keywords, publication years, sources, fields and countries. As a result; almost half of the publications produced in USA, “Byrne James e” is the most productive author, “Journal of International Economics” is the most cited journal, USA is also leading country in terms of citation, and “Natl. Chung Hsing Univ.” is the leading organization in terms of citation. Moreover, co-occurrence analysis on keywords show that digitalization has huge effect on L/C literature. Keywords like “blockchain”, “smart contracts”, “ethereum”, “BPO” etc. emerged as new trend in the last decade.