GREEN INVESTMENTS, ENERGY TRANSITION, AND FINANCIAL MARKETS: A BIBLIOMETRIC REVIEW OF THE 2021–2025 LITERATURE

The accelerating expansion of green investment and climate-oriented finance has intensified scholarly interest in the relationship between financial markets and the energy transition. However, as this literature has evolved across partially overlapping streams, there is a clear need to map its recent intellectual structure, thematic concentrations, and bridging areas. This study provides a comprehensive bibliometric review of research indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection, focusing specifically on the intersection of green investments, the energy transition, and financial markets. The analysis covers the period 2021–2025, with the dataset finalized on April 1, 2026. After applying temporal filters and restricting the sample to original research and review articles, a final corpus of 154 documents was established. Bibliometric mapping was performed using VOSviewer (v1.6.20) through co-occurrence analysis of all keywords. Using a minimum occurrence threshold of six and a thesaurus-based normalization procedure, the resulting network identified 27 key terms organized into three distinct thematic clusters. This was further complemented by a TIE/bridges analysis to identify cross-cluster documents. The results reveal that the field is structured around three core domains: green finance and sustainability-oriented transitions; financial market risk and transmission mechanisms; and climate finance, renewable energy, and return dynamics. The bridge analysis demonstrates that the strongest thematic interfaces emerge between market-risk studies and renewable energy finance, as well as between transition-oriented green finance and investment performance debates. By clarifying the recent structure of this rapidly expanding literature, this study identifies existing tensions, highlights policy relevance, and proposes critical directions for future research.