Abstract

With the proliferation of consumer behavior research in recent decades, the ability to effectively identify the most influential and representative collection of research articles had become significantly important. Research in the consumer behavior area had developed rapidly, but no recent studies had examined contemporary consumer behavior research. This paper employed author co-citation analysis, a bibliometric methodology and social network analysis methodology, to highlight the most influential authors, to analyze citation relationships, to exploit changes in the intellectual base and to show trends and patterns in the consumer behavior field over two consecutive time periods, 1989 to 1998 and 1999 to 2008. In order to analyze the dynamic intellectual structure of consumer behavior research, author co-citation analysis was conducted of 16,536 references from 606 articles found in the SSCI and SCI databases from 1989 to 2008. In addition, factor analysis was used to examine the breadth of the authors’ research areas. The aims of this paper were twofold: to provide a valuable direction for future consumer behavior research, and to propose an objective means of establishing the relative importance of different knowledge nodes in the recent development of the consumer behavior field.

Key words: Consumer behavior, bibliometric analysis, author co-citation analysis, social network analysis, knowledge of network.