I was excited to see a new article purporting to offer a “bibliometric analysis of research on personal insolvency.” My excitement soon turned to disappointment as I realized how fundamentally flawed the “analysis” was. To make lemonade out of lemons, I offer this cautionary tale for future analysts to avoid a research method gone horribly wrong.

Two main problems gutted this article’s results. First, the research method was shockingly simple, especially given the title of the article. The authors simply searched the Web of Science Core Collection for articles published from 2003 to 2024 mentioning “personal bankruptcy” or “individual bankruptcy.” That’s it. The authors recognized that “due to cultural and contextual differences,” definitions of these concepts might vary, but they seem to have made no effort to combat this problem. Mind you, the article’s very title uses the distinct term “personal insolvency” and it was published in the International Insolvency Review, but the authors chose not to search for “personal insolvency” or any number of other terms that describe research on point with their study. While British usage often (though increasingly less so) distinguishes personal bankruptcy from corporate insolvency, this does not seem to be the likely culprit here. The authors are all Chinese law and business professors, and the Chinese term used consistently (if not exclusively) in discussions of this hot topic in China is 个人破产 (personal/individual bankruptcy). While the text of the article notes the pertinent 2008 Taiwanese law, it refers to this law as “bankruptcy regulations”–although the Taiwanese law does not use that term; rather, it is called 消費者債務清理條例 (consumer debt clean-up/clearance act). The term “bankruptcy” is often avoided in the context of emerging personal/consumer debt relief laws around the world for a variety of reasons, and literature on this subject thus will often not mention “bankruptcy” at all. Indeed, the paper reports that among several sets of “core keywords,” the term “consumer bankruptcy” is part of the “core concept group” in this research (and appeared in the title of two of their top 10 papers), yet it does not seem to have occurred to them to double back and search explicitly for “consumer bankruptcy.” Why did the authors not add to their search terms “personal insolvency” or “consumer bankruptcy” or any number of other possible synonyms for “personal bankruptcy”? Such a search would have painted a very, very different picture of the existing literature on the topic of interest to these authors.

The second major problem was the data source. The Web of Science Core Collection contains lots of journal articles, but primarily from the sciences (read: Economics). Only two journals I read with any regularity were on this study’s top 10 list, the International Insolvency Review and the American Bankruptcy Law Journal. Every other journal in the top 10 was an economics or finance journal. See where we’re heading here? The article admits in its “limitations” section (at the end) that excluding specialized legal databases like Hein Online or Westlaw “may have resulted in a potentially restricted sample size for our bibliometric analysis.” You figure? I would hazard to guess that the great majority of published analysis of “personal bankruptcy” appears in US and British law journals, all of which this analysis ignored.

Ugh. My first big tipoff that there was something wrong here was the top 10 list of authors with the most publications on “personal bankruptcy.” Michelle White was number one with  … six articles on this topic in 22 years. Prof. White is a great scholar whom I admire, but the list of authors with more than six publications on personal bankruptcy in the last 22 years is far too long to set out here. Using just myself as an example, I’ve published 24 journal articles on personal bankruptcy during this 22-year period (not counting book chapters, reports, and shorter pieces). And of those 24, six were published in one of the two journals mentioned above that are in the Web of Science Core Collection. Three of these used the precise terms “personal bankruptcy” or “individual bankruptcy,” yet I was not listed among those with three such publications. Two other publications used “consumer bankruptcy” and one other “personal insolvency.” I might have been tied with Prof. White at the top of this list if the search terms had included the rather obviously related “consumer bankruptcy” and “personal insolvency.” Yet more terminological tweaking would have expanded my list and undoubtedly the lists of many other authors.

I’m not writing this to complain about my exclusion from yet another list of “top” things. I’m writing in the hope of encouraging/guiding future researchers to think a bit more carefully about the basics of their research plans–and for peer reviewers to scrutinize articles like this a bit more carefully before publishing such a misleading and disappointing “bibliometric analysis” fail.