Bibliometric Analysis of Green Marketing Research from 1977 to 2020

Abstract

The scientific community’s growing interest in green marketing research can be traced through the abundance of published literature on the topic. However, there is still a lack of a comprehensive and systematic research focusing on the evolution of this field. The main objective of this paper was to consolidate the state-of-the-art research on green marketing through a bibliometric study of articles published from 1977 to 2020, and to analyze and present the results from the perspective of growing trends in the field; productive and influential countries, institutions, authors, articles, and research journals; keywords; authorship patterns; and international collaborations. The study results indicate a gradual increase in green marketing research from 1977 to 2020, more so in the last five years. A total of 1025 scholarly documents were published in 634 journals during this period and listed in the Web of Science (WOS). The top 10 most productive countries were then analyzed. A great number of institutions from both developing countries (in terms of article count) and developed countries (in terms of citation scores), were compared. Finally, based on keywords and a three-factor analysis, it was concluded that green marketing, sustainability, sustainable development, environment marketing and sustainable marketing have attracted extensive attention during the past decade as keywords.