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To grow, any field of research must both encourage newcomers to work within its boundaries, and help them learn to conduct excellent research within the field’s parameters. This paper aims to examine whether the existing body of neuromarketing literature can support such growth. Specifically, the authors attempt to replicate how a newcomer to the field of neuromarketing would go about orienting themselves to the field and learn how to conduct excellent neuromarketing research.

A total of 131 papers, published in the areas of “neuromarketing” and “consumer neuroscience” were downloaded and then identified as conceptual or empirical in nature. A separate database was created for each type of research paper and information was recorded. For both conceptual and empirical papers, the citation details, notably year of publication, journal, journal ranking and impact factor were recorded. Papers were then descriptively analysed with regards to number of publications over the years, content and journal quality.

It is found that interest in the field is growing, with a greater variety of topics and methods appearing year on year. However, the authors also identify some issues of concern for the field if it wishes to sustain this growth. First, the highly fragmented literature and the lack of signposting makes it very difficult for newcomers to find the relevant work and journal outlets. Second, there is a lack of high-quality, user-oriented methodological primers that a newcomer would come across. Finally, neuromarketing as it appears to a newcomer suffers from a lack of clear guidance on what defines good vs bad neuromarketing research. As a large majority of the reviewed papers have appeared in lower-ranked journals, newcomers might get a biased view on the acceptable research standards in the field.

The insights from the analysis inform a tentative agenda for future work which gives neuromarketing itself greater scientific purpose, and the potential to grow into a better-established field of study within marketing as a whole.

This study is the first to examine consumer’s neural reaction to different merchandising communication strategies at the point-of-sale (PoS) by applying functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). By doing so, the purpose of this study is to extend consumer neuroscience to retail and shopper research.

Two experiments were conducted in which 36 shoppers were exposed to a realistic grocery shopping scenario while their brain haemodynamics were measured using mobile fNIRS.

Results revealed that mobile fNIRS appears a valid method to study neural activation of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in the field of “shopper neuroscience”. More precisely, results demonstrated that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) might be crucial for processing and predicting merchandising communication strategy effectiveness.

This research gives evidence that certain regions of the PFC, in particular the OFC and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), are crucial to process and evaluate merchandising communication strategies.

The current work opens a promising new avenue for studying and understanding shopper’s behaviour. Mobile fNIRS enables marketing management to collect neural data from shoppers and analyse neural activity associated with real-life settings. Furthermore, based on a better understanding of shoppers’ perceptual processes of communication strategies, marketers can design more effective merchandising communication strategies.

The study is the first to implement the innovative, mobile neuroimaging method of fNIRS to a PoS setting. It, therefore, opens up the promising field of “shopper neuroscience”.

Library Hi Tech is one of the most influential journals that publish leading research in library and information science (LIS). The present study aims to understand the scholarly communication in Library Hi Tech by profiling its historic footprint, emerging trends and knowledge diffusion.

A total of 3,131 bibliographic records between 1995 and 2018 were collected from the Web of Science. Text mining, graph analysis and data visualization were used to analyze subject category assignment, domain-level citation trends, co-occurrence of keywords, keyword bursts, networks of document co-citation and landmark articles.

Findings indicated that published research in the journal was largely influenced by the psychology, education and social domain as a unidisciplinary discipline. Knowledge of the journal has been disseminated into multiple domains such as LIS, computer science and education. Dominant thematic concentrations were also identified: (1) library services in academic libraries and related to digital libraries, (2) adoption of new information technologies and (3) information-seeking behavior in these contexts. Additionally, the journal has exhibited an increased research emphasis on mixed-method user-centered studies and investigations into libraries' use of new media.

This study provides a promising approach to understand scientific trends and the intellectual growth of journals. It also helps Library Hi Tech to become more self-explanatory with a detailed bibliometric profile and to identify future directions in editorship and readership. Finally, researchers in the community can better position their studies within the emerging trends and current challenges of the journal.