CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

PurposeOrganize and present the literature related to firm?s capital structure across the years and find the most relevant publications and authors in the research area. Moreover, we pretend to fill the gap in the literature by studying different works and their compatibility with the main theories. MethodologyThe Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is conducted by using Scopus database. The methodology applied is through a concise searching considering keywords, the most cited papers, the latest publications and theories that explain SMEs capital structure. FindingsSome key aspects about the capital structure of firms and SMEs are identified, such as documents per year, type of publications, the most used languages, the top journals, the most cited papers, the most productive and influential authors and the latest published papers. Research implicationsThis kind of study is effective in evaluating the scientific production and to find the most important contributions of the subject. Furthermore, this information is useful for researchers´ studies on SMEs capital structure to underline the research direction and to be acquainted with the literature tendency.Research limitationsThe information presented is only informative from the Scopus database. Hence, this work only gives a general orientation of the most relevant research and its tendency of this database. More exhaustive works could be done using different keywords and analyzing other firms? characteristics.OriginalityThere are not similar works that delve into the literature respect to SMEs capital structure and compare the main theories in relation to empirical works. Therefore, a synthesized evolution of previous works related to the capital structure of firms and SMEs is presented.