Fifty years of the European Journal of Marketing: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Purpose The European Journal of Marketing was created in 1967. In 2017, the journal celebrates its 50th anniversary. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to present a bibliometric overview of the leading trends of the journal during this period. Design/methodology/approach This work uses the Scopus database to analyse the most productive authors, institutions and countries, as well as the most cited papers and the citing articles. The investigation uses bibliometric indicators to represent the bibliographic data, including the total number of publications and citations between 1967 and 2017. Additionally, the article also develops a graphical visualization of the bibliographic material by using the visualization of similarities viewer software to map journals, keywords and institutions with bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis. Findings British authors and institutions are the most productive in the journal, although Australians’ are growing significantly the number of papers published. Continental European institutions are also increasing the number of publications, but they are still far from reaching the British contribution so far. In the mid-term, however, these zone’s authors and institutions, especially those from big European countries like France, Germany, Italy and Spain, should reach a closer performance to British ones; more as less long, historic, but more recent periods of analysis are considered. Practical implications This article is useful for any reader of this journal to understand questions such as papers’ European Journal of Marketing-related scientific productivity in terms of, for instance, contributors/authors, institutions and countries, or the main sources used to back them. Originality/value This is the first comprehensive article offering a general overview of the leading trends and researchers of the journal over its history.