The Structure and Evolution of the Marketing Field: A Content Analysis of Five Decades of Research within the Academy of Marketing Science Journals

This paper analyses five decades of research published in the journals of JAMS and AMS review (AMSR). The authors used a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm for unsupervised topic modeling. By conducting a content analysis (CA), the authors study the relationships between the research streams of marketing evolved during the four eras of the field's progress. A multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) was drawn to validate the mapping between the digitized keywords drawn from 1913 research articles with the topic labels and terms resulting from our LDA analysis. Finally, some future directions and the needed stream of literature is presented, whereupon a path towards reinvigorating marketing in era-V could be proposed. The authors suggest another possible solution to Hunt's call, hence instead of focusing on a re-institutionalization, wherein marketing may go backwards, it must focus on essential research themes of the future