Abstract:

This paper carries out a research by content analysis on 247 academic papers published in the Journal of Marketing during the year of 2005-2009, with a purpose to describe the subjects, methods and scholars of Western marketing research. The findings are as following: the main subjects that Western marketing research focuses on are consumer behavior, products, brands, marketing general management, industrial marketing, advertising and promotion, services marketing, and network marketing, Among which research on the general marketing management, products, brands, industrial marketing, network marketing have an escalating trend, and adverse on the prices and marketing channels, and the subjects on consumer behavior and services marketing remain to be the focus of marketing research. As for research methods of marketing, quantitative research keeps dominated and are used in such marketing research domain as brand, product and personal selling, the experimental method has been more widely used to study consumer behaviors, prices, advertising and promotion, the qualitative research and mixed research are seldom used, the former is used in industrial marketing, general marketing management, and the latter focus on the subject of marketing theory and philosophy. In addition, there exists a diversified form of cooperation among marketing scholars, which includes scholars’ cooperation in a university, among different universities, between university and business and among different counties.

Key words: Journal of Marketing, Marketing research, Academic paper, Documentary analysis