Product Placement Bibliometric Study: Generic Journals Versus Specific-Communication Journals

Media fragmentation represents new challenges for product placement strategies to become an increasingly effective way to reach consumers and non-users. In this frame, this paper has been developed with three main objectives: (i) to carry on a performance analysis to measure the visibility/impact of the scientific product in product placement (most cited authors, journals, and themes), (ii) to visually present the scientific structure by topics of research in product placement as well as its evolution to identify future research lines, and (iii) to compare both objectives in generic journals and specific communication ones. To this end, the resources in the Web of Science Citation Index were used. Scimat software was applied on a sample of 694 indexed papers from 1992 to 2021 containing “product placement” with 8,521 global citations (176 of the papers were indexed in communication journals with 3,190 citations). Our results show that MEMORY is a key motor theme—the future of research tends to new themes in the communication field (i.e., ATTITUDES/BEHAVIORS or VIRTUAL). Three industries have been key: alcohol, tobacco, and food. This research adds value to previous analysis as long as we have included: (i) a multidisciplinary approach; (ii) an unfolded analysis focusing strictly on communication journals; and (iii) a longitudinal analysis to compare different periods showing dynamic scientific maps.