Five decades of the Journal of Consumer Affairs: A bibliometric analysis

This study presents a retrospective of the Journal of Consumer Affairs (JCA) using bibliographic analysis between 1967 and 2019. The results indicate that both the number of JCA's publications and citations grew markedly over time. The dominant contributors to the journal are authors affiliated with U.S. institutions. Trends show increasing organizational diversity and collaboration among authors. The journal's central themes are consumer perception, consumer behavior, financial behavior, consumer spending patterns, financial literacy, consumer decision-making processes, and marketing practices. Statistically significant relationships exist between the following article attributes and citations based on our negative binomial regression analysis. Age has a negative association with citations, but the direction of association turns positive when considering non-linearity. A positive association exists between the number of authors, references, and U.S. affiliation. A negative relationship exists with article order, non-academic author, top institution affiliation (FT100), funding, lead article, title length, and conceptual article.