The wide adoption of location-enabled devices, together with the acceptance of services that leverage (personal) data as payment, allows scientists to push through some of the previous barriers imposed by data insufficiency and privacy skepticism. The research problems whose study require hard-to-obtain data (e.g., transportation mode detection, service contextualization, etc.) have now become more accessible to scientists because of the availability of data collecting outlets. One such problem is the detection of a user's transportation mode. Different fields have approached the problem of transportation mode detection with different aims: Location Based Services is a field that focuses on understanding the transportation mode in real-time, Transportation Science is a field that focuses on measuring the daily travel patterns of individuals or groups of individuals, and Human Geography is a field that focuses on enriching a trajectory by adding domain-specific semantics. While different fields providing solutions to the same problem could be viewed as a positive outcome, it is difficult to compare these solutions because the reported performance indicators depend on the type of approach and its aim (e.g., the real-time availability of Location Based Services requires the performance to be computed on each classified location). The contributions of this paper are three fold. First, the paper reviews the critical aspects that are desired by each field of research when providing solutions to the transportation mode detection problem. Second, it proposes three dimensions that separate three branches of science based on their main interest. Finally, it identifies important gaps in research and future directions,i.e., proposing: widely accepted error measures meaningful for all disciplines, methods robust to new datasets and a benchmark dataset for performance validation.