Mapping the corpus of consumer behaviour towards organic food: a bibliometric analysis

Purpose This study aims to uncover the key research themes and outline future avenues of research in the domain of consumer behaviour towards organic food through a bibliometric analysis. Design/methodology/approach A total of 386 papers were retrieved from the Scopus database from 2004 to 2025. A content analysis was performed on a curated set of 69 articles that emerged from bibliographic coupling. VOSviewer and RStudio were used to analyse, integrate and visualise the data. Findings The findings provided a clearer overarching view of publication trends, highlighting influential countries, institutions, organisations and journals that previous reviews had largely overlooked or underexplored. The prestige analysis identified the most prestigious papers by examining their augmented PageRank. Further, the bibliographic coupling analysis enabled us to categorise the literature into five thematic clusters, in which we identified existing research gaps and proposed directions for future researchers. Originality/value While existing literature has examined selected determinants of consumer behaviour towards organic food, it remains fragmented and lacks an integrated synthesis. This study is among the forerunners to comprehensively map the intellectual and thematic structure of consumer behaviour towards organic food research through rigorous bibliometric analysis. More importantly, the proposed future research avenues based on the theory, context, characteristics and methodology framework, hold the potential to enrich academic inquiry and policymaking in this domain.