Evolution of Mobile Payments Research

Mobile payments, as transformative financial innovations, have gained traction due to their convenience in facilitating commercial transactions. Over the last two decades, their rise has spurred a broad spectrum of research spanning technology adoption, financial inclusion, and security. However, since the literature largely remains fragmented, we suggest these divergent research clusters should be consolidated to develop a coherent overview of mobile payment research, to aid future research directions. To achieve this objective, we conducted a bibliometric literature review of 941 articles on mobile payments published between 2005 and 2024, employing the 'bibliometrix' package in RStudio for our analysis. Our findings demonstrate clear evolutionary paths in the dimensions of theory, technology, and context over three distinct periods of research growth.