A Bibliometric Study of SMEs' Digital Transformation Patterns in The Decade of Industry 4.0 Integration

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) play an essential role in global economic development, contributing significantly to employment, innovation, and national GDP across both developed and emerging economies.Regardless of their significance, SMEs face several challenges, including a slowdown in growth caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, intense competition among producers, and limited adoption of e-based solutions.Therefore, applying digital technologies has become essential to enhance the productivity and performance of SMEs.Despite the burgeoning systematic literature review on digital transformation and Industry 4.0, it predominantly focuses on large enterprises and often overlooks the strategic responses of SMEs.This study offers a novel bibliometric synthesis that not only maps the intellectual landscape of SMEs' digital transformation but also concentrates exclusively on the digital transformation of SMEs that is directly aligned with the core pillars of Industry 4.0.Using 510 articles retrieved from Scopus and analyzed with VOSviewer and R Studio software, the findings reveal five key clusters addressed by SMEs over the past decade.These five clusters are business model and competitive advantage, business performance and digital marketing, digital entrepreneurship and digital innovation, business model innovation, and big data analytics.