Science Mapping of Scholarly Work on the Nexus of Marketing Communication and Consumer-Level Food Waste: A Bibliometric Analysis

Purpose: The literature on consumer food waste (CFW) consists of manifold, divergent, but interconnected streams of communication research, each of which has its own theoretical abstraction, methodological settlements, and unresolved strains. This highlights a significant need for an understanding of research evolution over time, geographic concentration, thematic comprehension, and mapping of the conceptual and theoretical descendants of the field.Design/Methodology/Approach: A systematic bibliometric review method was used to achieve the research objective. Employing PRISMA, a final sample of 322 journal articles was extracted from the Scopus database. Thematic and descriptive analysis of the review was conducted to analyze the literature on the link between marketing communication and consumer level waste of food, applying a combination of citation, networking, visualization, and content analysis with the help of Bibliometrix and VOSviewer.Findings: Research on CFW and communication was limited till 2015. A sharp increase after 2020 indicates rising academic interest, likely driven by global sustainability initiatives. Research focus is mostly in developed countries, with a little increasing trend in developing countries. Research publishing outlets are mostly of an interdisciplinary nature and not purely from the field of marketing and consumer behavior. Keywords visualization and networking reveals relatively weak visual links between “communication” and mechanism-specific terms such as “message framing” or “social norms,” suggesting that these constructs are not yet routinely co-studied within the same research, despite their obvious conceptual relatedness.&Implications/Originality/Value: This bibliometric evidence offers a more reliable map of the intellectual structure of the field. The retailers and manufacturers are likely to find more immediately actionable than the still-consolidating, theoretically thinner literatures on framing and norms.