Unraveling Evolution and Trends of Information Technology Adoption in SMEs: a Systematic Review

Information Technology (IT) has become a crucial aspect in business development in the digital era, including for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). This research aims to conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and bibliometric analysis on the topic of IT adoption in SMEs in order to determine the evolution and development of IT adoption research trends in SMEs published in leading scientific journals. The data analyzed consisted of 49 published research articles indexed in the Scopus database and analyzed using R Bibliometric. The results show that the number of publications regarding IT adoption in SMEs has increased significantly and the types of documents are mostly articles in scientific journals. The result of bibliometrics show that research trends in IT adoption in SMEs in the last five years have focused on decision making, business, digital, cloud, impact, enterprises, adoption, technology, information, performance, and ERP. This study proves a major gap in the current literature in linking IT adoption theory and SMEs. The authors also outline several gaps that allow the authors to propose future research guidelines.