Knowledge structure in product- and brand origin–related research

Scholarly research regarding origins of products and brands is deep-rooted within international marketing, with an extraordinary following as evidenced by the large body of literature that is continuing to evolve. Our goal in this research is to examine this domain, generically referred to as the country-of-origin (CO) literature, and identify the most influential contributions and their corresponding topics that form the intellectual foundations of this knowledge domain. Using citation and co-citation analyses, we develop a spatial representation of the CO literature via multidimensional scaling with two concurrent goals of unfolding the literature’s knowledge structure as the basis for proposing a conceptual framework and identifying new research directions in the field. Our database consists of 482 articles, extracted from the Web of Science, that contain 33,194 citations through 2019. We develop a managerially relevant conceptual approach based on the results of our co-citations–based CO knowledge structure to unfold new research directions and expand the boundaries of the CO literature in fruitful directions.