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Given its multi‐faceted nature, consumer research has evinced interest from scholars both within and outside the marketing domain, resulting in ongoing knowledge contributions from a diverse range of disciplines. We conduct a comprehensive review and comparison across both marketing (“inside”) and non‐marketing (“outside”) disciplines to identify which topics are most and least focused on within each disciplinary domain and which are emerging as the most impactful. We also identify which of the marketing (FT50) journals are at the forefront of cutting‐edge research and demonstrate their contributions to the progression of the most impactful topics in the field. Based on our findings, we identify key gaps and under‐researched areas of substantive interest, highlight impactful emerging topics in non‐marketing journals where marketing could offer unique perspectives, and provide concrete suggestions and directions to further progress and stimulate consumer research.

In this research various concepts from network theory and topic modelling are combined, to provision a temporal network of associated topics. This solution is presented as a step-by-step process to facilitate the evaluation of latent topics from unstructured text, as well as the domain area that textual documents are sourced from. In addition to ensuring shifts and changes in the structural properties of a given corpus are visible, non-stationary classes of cooccurring topics are determined, and trends in topic prevalence, positioning, and association patterns are evaluated over time. The aforementioned capabilities extend the insights fostered from stand-alone topic modelling outputs, by ensuring latent topics are not only identified and summarized, but more systematically interpreted, analysed, and explained, in a transparent and reliable way.

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