Morphological mapping of ChatGPT’s integration in higher education: adoption to impact analysis

Purpose The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into education has significantly advanced, with ChatGPT emerging as a key technology for transforming learning environments. Prior reviews examined ChatGPT but lacked a multidimensional synthesis of its integration into higher education. This study offers a holistic understanding of ChatGPT’s role and identifies overlooked dimensions to guide future research and practice. Design/methodology/approach This study conducts a critical morphological analysis (MA) to understand how ChatGPT is integrated into global higher education. Findings It draws on six dimensions: user characteristics, ChatGPT adoption, enablers, applications, outcomes and ethical concerns. This study developed a cross-consistency matrix to map existing research patterns and research gaps. Key trends reveal growing attention toward institutional readiness and learning effectiveness, while gaps related to overdependence risks, socio-emotional learning and equitable access remain. Furthermore, thematically grouped future research directions are proposed for key stakeholders in academic settings: students, educators, institutional staff and higher education institutions/policymakers. Originality/value This study advances previous reviews by moving beyond thematic descriptions toward cross-dimensional analyses. The MA reveals three substantive findings that are invisible to single-dimension reviews: institutional enabler research remains empirically disconnected from measurable learning outcomes; individual user traits, such as anxiety and work avoidance, are rarely examined alongside ethical concern variants; and equity and digital divide concerns are not linked to institutional infrastructure conditions in the literature. These gaps, identified using the cross-consistency matrix, provide a structured and replicable basis for future empirical investigations.