This article is an attempt to determine the factors that are involved making the stock market behave in a manner consistent with the Adaptive Market Hypothesis (AMH). We have followed the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) methodology to select appropriate articles that meet our research objectives and carried out a bibliometric analysis to obtain a network visualization map based on keyword co-occurrences. We find that most of the studies have focused primarily on the return predictability aspect of stock returns. We suggest that the methodology should be extended towards incorporating other aspects of adaptive behaviours, such as investor behaviour, cyclical profitability of trading strategies and price–volume relationships in order to get a more comprehensive picture of the nature of adaptive stock markets. The review also demonstrates how the location of the stock market and methodology used in study influences the conclusions drawn regarding the nature of adaptive efficiency.