Published 2026-03-09
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Objective: The purpose of this article is to contribute to the scientific literature in the field of marketing and international business, through an exhaustive analysis of 52 publications indexed in the Scopus and Web of Science databases between 2013 and 2023, on the International Market Selection (IMS) process, essential for business internationalization.
Methodology: A qualitative analysis of the consolidated information in a bibliographic review matrix was carried out and, on the other hand, for the quantitative analysis of the data, the RStudio® and Bibliometrix® software were used.
Results: The study reveals a diversity of methodologies used in the analysis of the choice of the mode of entry into foreign markets for small and large companies. These include systematic analyses, case studies, multi-criteria approaches, evaluations of exporting firms, systematic/active behavior analysis, conceptual framework testing with regression models, and longitudinal data.
Theoretical and methodological contributions: The results confirm the need to integrate qualitative methods for a holistic understanding of the market and quantitative methods for the measurement of trends observed in the SMI.
Relevance: These results are relevant for the business-academia relationship because they offer a solid and guiding vision of the trends in studies in IMS and the combination of statistical methods, allowing to choose more precisely those markets with the best conditions to export goods and services.