A Bibliometric Review of the Special Issues of Psychology & Marketing: 1984‐2020

Abstract

Psychology & Marketing (P&M), an internationally reputed journal, publishes original, peerreviewed, empirical research on the application of psychological theories and techniques to marketing. The aim of this essay is to provide a bibliometric overview of the leading trends in the special issues of P&M over its history . Using bibliometric techniques, we analyze the impact of the special issues via their most cited papers, most productive authors, affiliated institutions and countries, as well as the best guest editors who contributed to the selection of the most cited special issue articles. Using network analysis VOSviewer software, we also group the special issues into four clusters to identify common themes. Further, we develop graphical visualization of coauthorships, bibliographic coupling, and cocitations. Results show that the most productive contributors are from American institutions and that P&M remains well connected to other leading journals in the marketing and psychology discipline, such as the

A bibliometric retrospection of marketing from the lens of psychology: Insights from Psychology & Marketing

“…Kessler (1963) introduced the term “bibliographic coupling” by demonstrating that scientific works exhibit intellectual convergence through identical referencing patterns. Such analysis has been widely used in recent studies—for example, Byington et al (2019), Baker et al (2020b), Donthu, Kumar, et al (2020), Khan et al (2020), and Kumar et al (2021). We use bibliographic coupling to present the intellectual clusters of P&M over the short and long run (Byington et al, 2019).…”

“…Though marketing was born out of economics, its growth has largely been driven by psychology. Indeed, the exploration of marketing phenomena has more often than not involved the scrutiny of individual and collective psyche of consumers (Cohen, 2020; Khan et al, 2020), which highlights the significant and invaluable contributions of psychology to marketing. Such contributions can be found most prominently in journals dedicated to the application of psychological theories and techniques to marketing.…”

“…Indeed, P&M has led and pioneered in many respects. From 1984 to 2020, P&M has published 58 special issues with 374 articles that have gained an average of 46.23 citations per article and a total of 17,289 citations according to bibliometric data from Scopus (Khan et al, 2020). Seminal articles in P&M include Nevid's (1984) article on neuroscience, which ignited interest in neuromarketing, Cohen's (1999) reflections on qualitative research, which spurred a slew of studies using the “dimensional qualitative research” methodology, and Zavestoski's (2002) special issue on anticonsumption, which pave the way for research on consumer resistance to, distaste of, and resentment or rejection of consumption (see complete list of special issues in Appendix ).…”

“…Similarly, Donthu, Kumar, et al (2020) offered an in‐depth retrospect of the 45 years of the Journal of Business Research , whereas Donthu, Reinartz, et al (2020) reviewed the same but for the first 35 years of the International Journal of Research in Marketing . More recently, Khan et al (2020) presented a bibliometric overview of the special issues in P&M . However, unlike Khan et al (2020), this study offers a deeper analysis of P&M between 1984 and 2020 irrespective of special issues.…”

“…More recently, Khan et al (2020) presented a bibliometric overview of the special issues in P&M . However, unlike Khan et al (2020), this study offers a deeper analysis of P&M between 1984 and 2020 irrespective of special issues. Such an endeavor can provide a more accurate overview of the scientific contributions of marketing research informed by psychology through P&M .…”