Global Trends in Digital Literacy and Women Entrepreneurship: Insights from a Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Digital literacy has become a key driver of women’s entrepreneurship in the evolving digital economy, enabling access to information, markets, and financial resources. Despite increasing academic attention, the research landscape at the intersection of digital literacy and women entrepreneurship remains fragmented. The aim of this study is to provide a detailed bibliometric analysis to map the global trends in research, the intellectual structures and emerging themes in this field. The analysis is performed based on publications published in the Scopus database from 2021 to 2026. The performance analysis and science mapping techniques are used to analyse the growth of publications, leading authors, influential journals and country level contributions. Collaboration analysis using co-authorship, co-citation and keyword co-occurrence methods are performed to detect the co-authorship patterns and thematic clusters in the literature. The results show that there is a considerable increase in research activity over the last few years, which points to an increase in research interest in digital inclusion and women’s economic empowerment globally. The paper covers the studies on financial inclusion, e-commerce adoption, financial empowerment, and financial skill development. The analysis also yields an impression of regional imbalance, with more publications from developed countries and less from developing economies, notwithstanding their context. The present study helps in this regard in providing a structured overview of the knowledge domain and highlighting the research gaps. It offers insights and relevance for researchers, policy makers and practitioners on how the transformative potential of digital literacy in promoting inclusive and sustainable womenled entrepreneurship.