Mapping Digital Transformation Research in Women-Led SMEs: A Bibliometric Analysis and Resilience-Oriented Research Agenda

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face persistent pressure to convert digital transformation into organizational resilience amid continuous digital disruption. This capacity remains conceptually underdeveloped when digitalization and gender are treated as separate concerns. This study focuses on women-led SMEs because resilience mechanisms, including risk perception, digital self-efficacy, and access to institutional finance, are not gender neutral. This study maps the confluence of gender, SMEs, and digital transformation through a bibliometric analysis of 145 Web of Science publications (2016–2026). Resilience serves as the interpretive framework guiding this synthesis, informed by the bibliometric findings on gender, SMEs, and digital transformation. Co-occurrence, citation, and overlay networks, constructed using VOSviewer, examine temporal evolution, geographic distribution, and thematic structure. The field shows three periods of scholarly development, with 62.8% of output concentrated in 2023–2026. Keyword co-occurrence analysis, using a thesaurus file that consolidates conceptually related terms, shows that digital transformation’s connectivity is comparable to other central terms across every threshold tested. The literature’s limits lie in three more specific structural separations: between adoption vocabulary and firm-level strategy vocabulary, between digital transformation and institutional and financial vocabulary tied to unequal credit access, and in an almost complete absence of vocabulary for interorganizational collaboration; gender-specific barrier terminology is similarly absent from the dominant keyword vocabulary at every threshold tested. Citation network analysis reveals regional variation in citation impact, partly related to differences in publication recency across countries. The study proposes a six-area research agenda for SME managers, support organizations, and policymakers seeking to strengthen resilience through gender sensitive digital transformation.