The vulnerability and resilience of road networks are important and widely discussed properties in the literature, providing insights into the behaviour and response of road networks when faced with disruptive natural or anthropogenic phenomena. The goal of this study was to provide an extensive literature review of scientific articles in the field of vulnerability and resilience of transportation road networks. To this aim, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was carried out investigating road network vulnerability and resilience by selecting all articles published between 2003-2023 and analyze 594 papers collected from Web of Science (WoS) using Bibliometrix-R software. The study identified the most influential scholars and their high-impact contributions, analyzed the influential institutions and countries most contributing to this field, and examined countries with the strongest international research collaborations. Resilience, vulnerability, and road network have been the research keywords in this study as shown in the word cloud. Moreover, the objectives of this review are: i) to identify the evolution and geographic distribution of the analysis of resilience and vulnerability of road networks; ii) to highlight which aspects of vulnerability and resilience have been mostly studied; iii) to report the most used quantitative methods and research gaps to study vulnerability and resilience. The result of this study will be beneficial in developing infrastructure resilience, ensuring sustainable and efficient transportation network resilience, and providing a future guide for both researchers and practitioners.