E-commerce product personalization and website personalization have been a topic of interest to a lot of researchers during the last years. As such, academic research in the area of personalization in e-commerce should rely on a rigorous literature review first in order to identify existing research and acknowledge the state of the art in research. This article provides a vast overview on personalization literature with a special focus on e-commerce (e.g. recommender systems). This literature, respectively our approach, can be used by fellow researchers to identify the basic literature for their own work. It serves as a rigorous way of retrieving literature for other fields in their scientific research. A complete reference list is presented as well as additional figures and tables analyzing the personalization literature in general and according to an emerging classification. The three major categories of personalization research in e-commerce are: “implementation”, “theoretical foundations”, and “user centric aspects” under which there are several subcategories into which the papers can be classified. The reviewed articles (42 in total out of 15,116) were taken from all the relevant, high ranked (A to C) journals according to the journal ranking list: JOURQUAL2.