Despite the relevance and maturity of research related to the Chief Information Officer (CIO) role, there are few studies that objectively and comprehensively summarize the current state of the art. This paper fills this research gap and presents a comprehensive literature review of the CIO research field using main path analysis. Based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 438 research articles, the central contributions in CIO research and different research directions are identified. Our results show that both established research directions, such as ‘CIO Role Development’ and ‘CIO Hierarchical Position and Relationships’, and emerging research directions, such as ‘CIO as Business Enabler’, are attracting growing attention. Based on the results, we derive promising further directions in the field of CIO research, e.g., such as those investigating the impact of new technologies.