Using Bibliometrics to Evaluate the Journal of Consumer Research: Suggested Future Consumer Research Directions

The academic discipline of consumer research continues to develop and grow. Many recent trends offer to enrich and enliven the field in almost endless ways, and a renewed sense of the field’s scope and direction has been proposed recently (Deighton et al. 2010; MacInnis and Folkes 2010). Such future-looking views are needed to advance the field. It has been 21 years since Hoffman and Holbrook (1993) published their bibliometric study of the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) that helped to solidify the unique contributors and intellectual structure of consumer research. This provided a foundational understanding of influential consumer research that set the tone until today. More recently, an examination of 20 years of research highlighted the emergence of “consumer culture theory” (Arnould and Thompson 2005, 868). However, uncertainty about the future direction and unique contribution of consumer research is ever present. As such, our understanding of its intellectual structure as a field requires a fresh take on the uniquely important and significant theoretical perspectives in the domain.

In that spirit, we conduct a complete analysis of all JCR articles from 1998 through 2011. The purpose of this study is to reliably assess and establish the scope and contribution of mainstream consumer research and to offer suggestions concerning promising opportunities and emerging directions based on past research. We base our bibliometric analysis on 27,510 citations from 651 JCR articles and rely on the sociology of philosophies literature to provide a basis for interpreting our findings and offer possible suggestions to researchers. Our study follows the rationale of intellectual historians who seek to identify and track the key networks of ideas that have shaped disciplines over time to provide important information to researchers, editors, reviewers, and academic leaders of a discipline. Collins (1998) stated, “Creativity is not random among individuals, it builds up in intergenerational chains…. The social structure of intellectual attention is fluidly emergent … and can be seen only in retrospective mode” (6, 15). This applies to the advancement of consumer research, as well. Only by examining past contributions in a systematic way can past research contribute to future work. With the study’s limitations in mind, our research offers a review of consumer research that is anchored in multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis.

Such an approach is important because consumer research has evolved into its own epistemic community of shared knowledge. At the outset, the historical analysis of the discipline has developed over time and has served an important part of the field’s development (Hoffman and Holbrook 1993). For example, Wells (1993) discussed the relative positioning of JCR among the top marketing journals, citing its strong business orientation and its increasingly interdisciplinary nature. Tellis, Chandy, and Ackerman (1999) evaluated JCR and found it historically less diverse than other top marketing journals. In fact, they called for research to determine whether the emerging pattern of diversity using naturalistic inquiry would hold up over time. A rejoinder stated that “JCR articles are more likely to rely on sources that are more conceptually distinct from marketing and business” (Bettencourt and Houston 2001, 313) but called for more research to confirm this claim and to include an expanded time frame. Responding to these expressed concerns and using a conceptual thinking approach critical to the advancement of any research domain (MacInnis 2011), the discipline itself is the object of analysis in this study.