Author(s): Santosh Kumar, Bipin Chauhan, Raghvendra, Rashi Saxena,Smita Dron and Sanny Kumar
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) continue to be a widely used strategy for organisational growth in order to secure future competitiveness. Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are significant methods that corporations use to implement their domestic and worldwide plans. M&A research has gathered a considerable amount of knowledge as a significant area of study. Nevertheless, despite the substantial amount of study conducted in recent years, there are noticeable disparities between the comprehension of the M&A phenomena in academic literature and the practical significance of M&A activities. The presence of diverse viewpoints from many schools of thought, conflicting study outcomes, and ongoing debates, together with the dynamic nature of economic conditions, contribute to the intricate nature of M&A research. This underscores the importance of adopting comprehensive and all-encompassing techniques. This study performs a comprehensive bibliometric analysis utilising published data from the Elsevier Scopus database to examine the development and pattern of mergers and acquisitions in the banking sector. The search query "TITLE-ABS-KEY"(Merger*, OR Acquisition*, AND Bank*) was employed to find pertinent papers on merger and acquisition in the banking industry. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of selected 276 articles based on a minimum citation threshold of 10 and published during a span of 23 years, from 1991 to 2023. The purpose of the study was to examine publishing patterns and determine key contributors, prolific authors, influential institutions, leading countries, the temporal evolution of publications, citation trends, and the dissemination of research across different sources. The analysis offers a comprehensive view of the discipline, highlighting the works that have had the most significant influence, the intellectual linkages between authors and works, the primary research traditions, and the issues explored in M&A-related study. Through structural and longitudinal investigations, the alterations in the conceptual framework of the field are unveiled as time progresses. It can be concluded that strategic choices like M&As always prioritise the imperative of achieving sustainable expansion in order to secure future competitiveness in the contemporary era. The continuous and proactive extension of a firm's own development limitations through mergers and acquisitions is a crucial strategy for effectively and efficiently meeting the consequent obligations. The appeal of M&A in this setting lies in its capacity to effectively address the strategic issues of a rapidly changing environment. Given the growing level of economic and financial integration, mergers and acquisitions in the banking sector has been evolved at a broader scale.