Applying bibliometrics and econometrics, the study analyses 1191 works of trade credit research published till 2019.
About 69 % of the literature are published after the global economic crisis of 2008.
Literature on trade credit converge to three major sub-domains of banking and finance, production and operations, and accounting.
The banking and financing cluster exhibits the highest growth followed by production and operations.
Reputation of the publishing hub, empirical studies, and the production and operational dimensions of the research positively and significantly influence its citations.
Alongside a thorough retrospection, the paper also discusses the future research agenda.
This study presents an overview of the state-of-the-art in trade credit research by examining 1191 publications between 1955 and 2019. Applying bibliometric and econometric tools, this study presents a comparative analysis of the extant research across the three sub-domains of banking and finance, production and operations, and accounting. Findings suggest that the financial emergency in the global market had resulted in a watershed moment in trade credit research. About 69 % of the literature was found to have emerged after the global economic crisis of 2008. A network analysis grouped the trade credit articles into four major and four minor clusters. The banking and financing cluster exhibited the highest growth followed by the production and operation cluster while the perspectives of accounting are yet to gain traction. Conversely, reputation of the publishing hub, empirical studies, and the production and operational dimensions of the research positively and significantly influence citations. Alongside thorough introspection, the study also provides new areas to direct the course of future research.