The World Bank reported a significant decline in global poverty of approximately 29.5% from 1990 to 2023; however, poverty remains widespread, affecting about 659 million people. To sustain their livelihoods, individuals living in poverty often engage in informal entrepreneurship due to its low entry barriers and minimal skill requirements. This study employs bibliometric methods to analyse 1,523 Scopus-indexed journal articles on poverty and entrepreneurship published between 1974 and 2024. The analysis integrates descriptive performance indicators and science-mapping techniques, including citation and co-word analyses conducted using VOSviewer. The findings indicate that the strongest internal co-authorship networks are within the United States, the United Kingdom, and Malaysia. The most influential study is Mair and Marti (2009), which focuses on local institutions acting as social entrepreneurs that leverage constrained resources to alleviate poverty among women. The dominant themes identified through the intersection of co-word analysis, bibliographic coupling, and citation analysis include poverty reduction in developing countries, microfinance and microcredit, and social entrepreneurship. These findings suggest that effective poverty alleviation policies should move beyond innovation-centric entrepreneurship models to empowerment-based, context-sensitive approaches that integrate microfinance, social entrepreneurship, and institutional support to address the realities of necessity-driven entrepreneurship among marginalised populations.