Mapping Social Capital and Unveiling Emerging Trends through Systematic Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis

The Social Capital (SC) concept is investigated by researchers in numerous academic disciplines including, business, education, entrepreneurship, economics, human resource management, environmental and health sciences, and political and social sciences. This study is dual-focused and uses a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and bibliometric analysis to examine the literature on SC both quantitatively and qualitatively. This study examined seven research questions: 1) the descriptive detail of the recognized previous studies on SC, 2) the tendencies of the annual scientific production on SC, 3) the greatly related and greater-influence factors on SC, 4) clustering of sources based on Bradford's Law, 5) the most relevant nations for SC, 6) the highly relevant authors and the authors' productivity through Lotka’s Law of Authors’ Scientific Productivity, and 7) the emerging trends and themes for future investigations in the field of SC. 4295 articles that were extracted from the Scopus database were analyzed in this study using the SLR and bibliometric analysis mapping approaches. VOSviewer and Biblioshiny software were the analysis tools used. The results indicate that SC is a subject discipline evolving progressively, with a record of 20.21% yearly growth in scientific productivity between 1994 and 2023. The USA, UK, and China were the highly relevant nations in the discipline of SC based on scientific publications and citations. Social networking, entrepreneurship, innovation, knowledge management, social media, sustainability, human capital, psychological capital, intellectual capital, governance, collective actions, and cultural capital are the emerging trends and pathways for impending researchers in the context of SC, as per the keyword clusters co-occurrence analysis, thematic map of keywords analysis, and trend topic analysis. The present article offers an extensive literature evaluation, which contributes to the remaining literature on SC. The results of this investigation will be advantageous for students, entrepreneurs, employers, politicians, government, policymakers, and society worldwide.