The Journal of Consumer Marketing at age 35 : a retrospective overview

Purpose: The Journal of Consumer Marketing (JCM) has ceaselessly strived toward presenting updated insights on consumer behavior in the marketplace. Blending both theory and practice, it features rigorous consumer-centric research, which addresses pressing managerial concerns. Recently, the JCM completed 35 years of publishing. This study aims to track its evolution from 1984 to 2019. Design/methodology/approach: The application of sophisticated bibliometric techniques offers a deeper insight into the evolving trends of the journal, its core authors and their affiliations. This paper explores the thematic trends for JCM’s articles using principal component analysis (PCA) and through bibliographic couple, the authors expose JCM’s knowledge structure. Findings: The JCM published 1,422 articles by 2019 contributed by 2,247 unique authors. At 34.56 average citations to its articles cited, the academic popularity of the journal reached 41,989 citations in Scopus. Research featured in the JCM has explored approximately 2,225 unique themes. PCA under Varimax rotation constructed three thematic factors for the most popular JCM themes. Simultaneously, bibliographic coupling analysis identified nine clusters of the JCM’s articles. Research limitations/implications: The study is based on the bibliometric records obtained from Scopus and would be subject to the limitations of the database, apart from being limited by the word length of this paper. Originality/value: The study conducts the first retrospective analysis of the JCM, which may be useful for global readers, including its editorial board.