The rapid expansion of underutilized buildings in urban areas, coupled with the persistent challenges of providing affordable housing, has caused significant environmental, social, and economic problems. Adaptive reuse, which involves the repurposing of existing structures, emerges as an effective strategy for mitigating environmental impacts, preserving cultural heritage, and promoting urban regeneration. Nevertheless, despite the adoption of adaptive reuse approaches in revitalizing abandoned buildings, achieving full success in this process has occasionally proven unattainable. This deficiency is primarily due to the lack of a thorough assessment of essential factors shaping adaptive reuse, as well as the challenge of evaluating their extent of influence on strategic planning and execution processes. The present study, aimed at identifying and prioritizing the critical criteria that affect the success of adaptive reuse projects, addresses the following research question: "Which criteria hold greater importance in determining the effectiveness of adaptive reuse?"

Through literature review by using a descriptive-analytical, the criteria of the adaptive reuse methodology were identified as 105 criteria and categorized into these eight distinct groups: (1) market-economy; (2) sustainability in environmental and energy domains; (3) location and neighborhood-public benefits; (4) structure-performance; (5) ease of transformation -continuity; (6) cultural-social-authenticity factors; (7) architectural factors-quality standards; and (8) law-management-government. An examination of citation frequencies via content analysis, combined with the application of the Shannon Entropy method for prioritizing criteria categories, demonstrated that "architectural factors-quality standards" and "law-management-government" represent common intersections across both analyses, thereby playing a pivotal role in the success of adaptive reuse initiatives. The analysis of the studies further revealed that architectural, cultural-social, and environmental sustainability criteria exercise substantial influence on the success of adaptive reuse projects, exhibiting alignment with findings from previous research. The proposed solutions—including the enhancement of architectural quality, the promotion of functional flexibility, and adherence to legal frameworks—furnish a practical framework for optimizing such projects.