Entrepreneurship has become a dynamic field of research in the last two decades. However, ‘rural entrepreneurship’ has been largely overlooked. It seems therefore timely to present a quantitative survey of the literature in this particular area. Based on 181 articles on rural entrepreneurship published in journals indexed in Scopus, we found that rural entrepreneurship is an essentially European concern, whose most prolific authors are affiliated with institutions in the UK and Spain. Organisational characteristics, policy measures and institutional frameworks and governance have attracted considerable attention in recent years, being considered emergent topics of research. In contrast, theory building has not attracted much research over the period in analysis, which suggests that the theoretical body of rural entrepreneurship is still incipient, hindering the establishment of its boundaries and of a suitable research agenda. Empirical literature on rural entrepreneurship has focused mainly on developed countries, most notably, the UK, the USA, Spain, Finland and Greece. Given the potential rural entrepreneurship represents for less developed and underdeveloped countries, more research on the topic targeting these countries is an imperative.