The Intellectual Structure of Consumer Research: A Bibliometric Study of Author Cocitations in the First 15 Years of the Journal of Consumer Research

Abstract

This study explores the analysis of citations in the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) during its first 15 years of publication. We review previous work on citation analysis in marketing and consumer research, and we argue for the value of a more complex approach based on patterns of cocitation. Toward this end, we develop a data base that draws on the work of the 42 most frequently published authors in JCR in the first 15 years. We introduce a new, two-stage procedure to investigate the underlying structure in the from-versus-to or citing-cited matrix based on numbers of references among these authors. Our procedure yields a scale of citing-cited asymmetry for the 42 consumer researchers, a “citation-similarity space” showing patterns of symmetric citation among the researchers, and measures of research atypicality. These separate yet complementary results give interesting insights into patterns of cocitation among consumer behavior researchers and thereby appear to reflect the intellectual structure of consumer research.