A substantial number of individuals migrate from their home countries and establish new enterprises in foreign contexts. This increasingly studied phenomenon, known as transnational diaspora entrepreneurship, has attracted growing academic attention. The objective of this paper is to systematically review this topic by identifying gaps in the existing literature and underscoring the need for additional research in this expanding area of inquiry. This study integrates a conventional literature review strategy with an innovative topic modeling technique. The manual review enables inductive identification of key themes, while topic modeling extracts the dominant thematic structures in the research corpus. The results highlight several key observations. First, diaspora entrepreneurs can be grouped according to clear differences in their entrepreneurial behavior and activities. Second, the majority of existing studies rely on case-based methodologies, indicating a need for more empirical quantitative research. Third, despite the absence of a universally accepted definition of transnational diaspora entrepreneurship, it is characterized by several unique features that set it apart from other forms of entrepreneurship. Lastly, multiple conceptual approaches to transnational diaspora entrepreneurship are identified and synthesized based on entrepreneurs’ lived experiences, identities, and spatial contexts. This research contributes to the literature by applying natural language processing techniques to a dataset of academic abstracts, thereby offering a broad mapping of dominant research themes in diaspora entrepreneurship. It also emphasizes the need for more quantitative studies to capture better the structural patterns and broader impacts of this phenomenon. Overall, the study highlights the complexity and potential value of diaspora entrepreneurial activity, providing a foundation for future academic work.
