The emergence of digital transformation and digitization has significantly influenced business growth, particularly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study conducts a systematic bibliometric analysis to investigate the relationship between digital transformation and firms’ financial performance. The primary objectives are identifying research gaps and proposing future research directions and policy implications. Specifically, we examine the evolution of digital transformation in companies and its impact on their financial performance, while highlighting the major trends in digital transformation research. Employing text mining techniques, network analysis, and a systematic literature review (SLR), we evaluated 153 articles published between 2014 and 2023. Our analysis delves into academic publication journals, geographical locations, authors’, and academic institutions’ contributions, assessing their influence on the existing literature’s development. Our findings indicate a current absence of a consistent theoretical framework in the scientific literature pertaining to the study of digital transformation and its effects on firms’ financial performance. Furthermore, we have pinpointed specific areas that warrant further investigation, including SMEs, non-listed companies, and intermediary or mediating variables. Finally, this systematic bibliometric analysis contributes to the ongoing discourse on digital transformation and its influence on firms’ financial performance, summarizing the current scientific research and proposing new research directions for future studies, while also offering valuable insights for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners.

With the rapid development of industrialization and the economy, the side effects of ecological problems have become more and more serious, and the importance of the sustainable development paradigm has begun to be valued. This study conducts an empirical analysis of green enterprises and explores the influence of customer involvement and boundary spanning capability on green innovation. The results of the analysis show that there is a positive correlation between customer involvement and boundary spanning capability (including three subordinate factors). Secondly, the results of analyzing the influence relationship between customer involvement and green innovation show that customer involvement has a positive impact on green innovation. In addition, the analysis of the relationship between boundary expansion force and environmental protection innovation shows that there is a positive correlation between the two variables, and the analysis of the mediation effect of boundary spanning capability shows that there is a partial mediation effect between customer involvement and green innovation. However, this study has various limitations in the context of environmental protection, as it is an exploratory study in which the boundary expansion capabilities of firms are manipulated in the context of environmental protection and empirically analyzed through a questionnaire method. For clearer research results, it is necessary to re-validate this research model with objective data in the future.

This study is based on social exchange theory and the UTAUT model to develop a research model to investigate the impact of motivations under the background of established enterprise social media (ESM) in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Motivations like organization rewards (OR), reciprocal benefits (RB), expectation fulfillment (EF), and job relevance (JR) have different impacts on the following two dimensions of trust: affect-based trust (ABT) and technology-based trust (TBT). This study considers the trust mechanism as the mediator in the relationship between motivations and knowledge sharing (KS). It also demonstrates the psychological element of social alienation (SA) as a moderator that influences trust level and its inhibitory effect on knowledge sharing within the organization. The authors in this study collected data from managers and employees in seven enterprises, including three retail enterprises and four information technology (IT) enterprises in China through three waves. In total, 509 responses were received, and 483 valid data were used to test the research model and hypotheses through the structural equation modeling (SEM) method to evaluate the impact of the potential elements on knowledge-sharing behavior. This research found that motivations like OR and RB promote ABT, thereby encouraging knowledge sharing when employees use ESM. The motivations of EF and JR have a direct effect on TBT, as well as promoting knowledge sharing. Both ABT and TBT have mediating roles between motivations and KS. In addition, the research also revealed the negative moderation effect of SA on the relationship between the two types of trust and KS. Specifically, SA gradually weakens the effects of ABT and TBT on KS, especially when employees are experiencing high levels of SA; ABT and TBT have no impact on KS. This study attempts to advance the theoretical and practical insights of motivations on knowledge sharing by exploring mediating effects of trust mechanisms. It also reveals the importance of SA’s moderation effect on the relationship between trust mechanisms and KS under the application of ESM.