Purpose Through a bibliometric analysis and scientific mapping, this study aims to examine research in the field of social marketing over the past 50 years and to propose a future research agenda. Design/methodology/approach A bibliometric analysis based on keyword co-occurrences is used to analyze 1,492 social marketing articles published from 1971 to 2020. The articles were extracted from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. SciMAT software was used, which provides a strategic diagram of topics, clusters, networks and relationships, allowing for the identification and assessment of relational connections among social marketing topics. Findings The results show that advertising, fear and children were some of the driving themes of social marketing over the past 50 years. In addition, the analysis identifies four promising areas for future research: consumption, intervention, strategy and analytical perspectives. Research limitations/implications This analysis can serve as a reference guide for future research in the field of social marketing. This study focused on quantitative analysis. An in-depth qualitative analysis would be a valuable future extension. Originality/value This research offers a unique systematic analysis of the progression of social marketing scholarship and provides a guide for future research related to social marketing. Importantly, this work suggests crucial issues that have not yet been sufficiently developed.