A Scientometric Review on Real Estate Investment Trusts: Towards a New Asset-Information-Capital Framework

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) has caused great concern for its capacity of serving the real economy with the capital market. The research related to REITs is more and more, especially in China. It is vital for interested researchers to get full picture of global research. However, the current review in the field of REITs mainly focuses on the summary of single area of REITs, and there is a lack of systematic review of other latest research progress in this field. This paper reviews the current REITs research with 817 academic papers from Web of Science database by scientometric analysis techniques. Visual analysis of authors, affiliations, countries, and keywords through CiteSpace software reveals the main areas and future trends in REITs research. Based on this, 4 major themes are identified, that is, risk and uncertainty management, capital structure, investment performance, price volatility. Additionally, a new AIC (Asset-Information-Capital) framework is also proposed to structure existing REITs research. Finally, 3 specific future directions are presented to comprise more attention on social performance of REITs, asset choice with environment-oriented configuration, the match between governance and regulation of REITs. Therefore, this paper provides a critical review of the extant REITs literature, and also contributes to the development of REITs practice in China.