Detecting salient themes in financial marketing research from 1961 to 2010

The present paper analyses research in the social science subfield of financial marketing research (FMR). We apply a bibliometric approach, using co-word analysis combined with performance analysis and science mapping, to detect and visualise conceptual subdomains and identify the most prominent themes. The thematic networks extracted show the associations between the main concepts treated by the FMR community, thus allowing us to examine its intellectual structure over the last 50 years (1961-2010). The findings are combined with the trends identified through a review of the corpus of manuscripts analysed and a temporal analysis. This longitudinal approach provides a snapshot of the thematic evolution of financial services research and predicts where such research could lead.