The relevance of goal programming for financial portfolio management: a bibliometric and systematic literature review

Goal programming models have been highly relevant for portfolio management and selection due to their ability to handle multiple conflicting objectives simultaneously. These models possess simple and effective and features that support the decision-making process by incorporating different types of risk. Using a bibliometric approach, we collected 155 articles published from 1973 to 2022 from journals indexed in the Scopus database. Multiple software platforms (RStudio, VOSviewer, and Excel) were employed to analyze the data and depict the most active scientific actors in terms of countries, institutions, sources, and authors. Our review revealed three different stages and an upward trajectory in the publication trend starting from 2003 and found the predominant application of some Goal Programming models, such as the stochastic, fuzzy, and polynomial models. Moreover, we discovered that Spain, the USA, and China were the top three contributors to the literature, indicating a global interest in this area. The global relevance of goal programming is confirmed by the top 20 authors and their collaboration networks. We observed the dialogue between different disciplines, namely Decision Science and Management/Finance. Our study contributes to the body of knowledge in the intersection between goal programming and financial portfolios by (1) identifying the most influential articles and authors on this topic and (2) mapping and visualizing the trends in this field of research through network and cluster analysis.