Retail research has changed shape over the past couple of decades, according to an analysis of almost 5,200 papers. The study, published in the International Journal of Electronic Marketing and Retailing, found the field moved through five distinct phases — and it also found a persistent problem: the work is scattered across disciplines that rarely talk to each other.
The team behind the analysis read papers from the four leading specialist journals in retail. They used thematic analysis, a method for spotting recurring patterns in written material, along with manual coding, to track how topics, theories and methods changed over the years. What they mapped was a field that followed the shops themselves. This connects to our earlier piece, TESS Found Its First Microlensing Planet — a Super-Jupiter 40,000 Light-Years Out.
The five phases they identified cover operations; digital and experiential retail; consumer behavior and sector specialization; optimization and service integration; and social media. According to Phys.org, the analysis shows how changing external stimuli — store environments, then digital interfaces — affect consumers psychologically and shape buying behavior, and how scholarship tracked those changes step by step.
What exactly did the study examine?
The corpus was large but bounded. The researchers considered papers from the four leading specialist journals in the retail area, covering business practices, consumer behavior and technology. That is almost 5,200 papers in total, enough to see patterns that any single-year snapshot would miss.
Thematic analysis and manual coding are the method here, not experiments or surveys. The team read for recurring themes and coded them by hand. That makes the five phases a structured reading of the literature rather than a measurement of it — a map of what retail researchers chose to study, drawn from what they actually published.
Why does the field's fragmentation matter?
The analysis surfaced a persistent issue: studies are dispersed across disciplines including marketing, economics, geography and management. Retail has clear economic importance, and specialist academic programs have been built to study it, yet the research itself sits in separate disciplinary silos.
The authors argue that a clearer understanding of how the field developed could help educational establishments shape curricula and executive training in this area. It would also, they argue, help researchers and businesses understand and respond to emerging challenges, including artificial intelligence and changing patterns of consumer engagement.
How strong is this evidence?
The strength of a bibliometric-style study like this lies in its scope: almost 5,200 papers across four leading journals is a substantial base. Its limits follow from the same choice. The analysis covers specialist retail journals, so work on retail published in general marketing or economics venues sits outside the frame. The phases describe the literature those journals carried, not the whole of retail scholarship.
The method also matters. Thematic analysis with manual coding depends on the coders' judgments about what counts as a recurring pattern. The published account describes the five phases clearly, but readers evaluating the finding should treat it as an interpretive map — a careful one, built on a large corpus, but interpretive all the same.
What the phases say about the field itself
One detail worth pausing on: the sequence of phases mirrors the industry's own history. Research on operations came first, then digital and experiential retail, then consumer behavior and sector specialization, then optimization and service integration, and most recently social media. The study's authors read this as evidence of the growing influence of e-commerce, data analytics and social media on retail scholarship itself. For related coverage, see Rubin Observatory's First Data Drop Delivered 11,000 New Asteroids.
In other words, the field did not set its own agenda in isolation. It responded to what shops and shoppers were doing. That is a useful corrective to the idea that academic fields develop mainly through internal debates. Here, the external stimuli — a new store format, a new interface, a new platform — pulled the research along.
What happens next
The authors point to artificial intelligence and shifting consumer engagement as the challenges the field now faces. Whether the next phase of retail research consolidates across disciplines or fragments further is the open question the analysis leaves on the table. The evidence establishes where the field has been; it cannot say where it goes from here.
For anyone tracking how research fields evolve, this study is a case study in self-examination: a field reading its own output to find its shape. The full paper, "The evolution of retail scholarship: looking back to move forward" by Mariam Hamam and colleagues, carries the DOI 10.1504/ijemr.2026.156742.
