Mapping the landscape of sustainable finance (2004–2025): A bibliometric analysis

• All of top 10 journals with the highest average citations are Q1 category across various JCR disciplines, demonstrating the role of high-impact outlets in shaping the field’s academic visibility. The quartile-based keyword co-occurrence analysis reveals a clear thematic stratification across journal quality levels. • China and Japan dominate publications in sustainable finance, indicating that national policies and institutional systems play an important role in shaping research output. • Keyword co-occurrence and clustering analyses uncover four key themes of sustainable finance, that is, environmental transition, governance and policy, economic performance, and technological innovation. Sustainable finance supports long-term investment and financing aligned with environmental, social, and economic goals. This study conducts a bibliometric analysis of 2,101 SSCI-indexed articles on sustainable finance (2004–2025) from the Web of Science (WoS) database. Using CiteSpace and VOSviewer, we examine the following key aspects, in terms of leading journals, institutions and countries, highly cited articles, core research themes and development trend of sustainable finance. Our findings contribute to the deeper understanding of knowledge landscape of sustainable finance and offer valuable insights for future academic inquiry, interdisciplinary collaboration, and policy development.