Forty-nine years of sensory research literature: a review on its development, foundation and future research directions

The notion of sensory is complex and bounded with different disciplines. In anthropology, it is a socially regulated concept which is not static and mediates cognition and sensation. Even though the intriguing research on 'the relationship between the senses and consumer-marketing' has been acknowledged, especially after the prominent recognition of the psychology of consumer research in the 1970s, the conceptual foundation is fragmented and scattered; it has become more multifaceted due to increased attention to it and its related concepts, which makes an investigation of the concept essential. This paper evaluates the foundational intellectual structure of sensory research over four decades, between 1970 and 2019. Based on the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) database, we apply four bibliometric methods to determine the theoretical underpinnings of sensory research and to reveal the important topics that have been related to the sensory domain. Our findings revealed twelve research groups (i.e., spatial judgement, congruency in scent) and six research clusters (i.e., transition from experience to sensory, sensory stimuli aspects and their effects) embodied by sensory research, which can be considered to make up the integral structure of the sensory domain. This article provides a comprehensive understanding of sensory research for those who wish to understand its intellectual structure. We propose a future research model that identifies three important perspectives (methodological, micro and macro) based on the recent highly cited articles and agendas for researchers hoping to provide insights on sensory research based on emerging sensory topics.

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