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Purpose: As the landscape of higher education continues to evolve, the assessment of higher education institutions' performance stands as a critical endeavour that shapes the future of education, research, and societal progress. This research presents a valuable insight to perform a bibliometric analysis combined with a systematic literature review, and aims to understand the evolution, focus, and future research directions within higher education industry for effective management practices. Design/methodology/approach: The article selection process adhered to the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines. The collection of articles originated from the Scopus database and included 211 publications spanning from 2004 to June 2024. Biblioshiny, an application available within the R software, facilitates bibliometric analysis by translating outcomes into a variety of visual presentations, whereas VOSviewer software is used to perform keyword co-occurrence network visualization. Findings: The findings encompass leading journals, most influential authors, country scientific production map, outcomes of keyword analysis, word cloud, trend topics, and thematic map. The focus of HEIs to attain business performance was identified. Additionally, the authors also outline several gaps that proposed future research guidelines. Practical implications: The outcomes offer valuable insights for researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and top management of HEIs in understanding the evolution and focus of HEIs' performance. Originality/value: The study presents unique contributions to the prevailing body of knowledge by offering a comprehensive past, present and future research directions concerning performance of HEIs in the last two decades. Keywords: Performance, Higher Education Institutions, Systematic Literature Review, Bibliometric Analysis, Biblioshiny, VOSviewer Classification: Conceptual paper, Introduction Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) play a pivotal role in shaping societies and economies by nurturing knowledge, skills, and innovation, and increase graduates' employability (Abbas et al., 2021). As the [...]