meaning of visual analysis in research

Perhaps what is missing in this context are the children’s direct voices and their own meaning-making through their work. As the dialogue with the teacher participants sometimes, takes place a period after the creation of their artwork and there was insufficient opportunity to take the time to dialogue directly with the children but rather to learn about the process through the teacher participants’ perspective at this stage. The meaning-making process here considers mainly the interpretation of the teacher and the researcher. The fact is that images should be acknowledged to be multi-vocal, having the ability to ‘speak’ to different audiences in a variety of contexts ( ; ).

In current times, digital media has reached into our mundane everyday existences, most obviously through the cell phone and modern-day gadgets, social media and these digital artefacts have engendered new forms of ethnographic enquiry. One of these includes what might be termed as the cultural politics of media and examines cultural identities, representations and imaginaries ( ). Fleer & Ridgway, (2014) outline and frame visual narrative data based on cultural-historical theory. Cultural historical theory acknowledges that the characteristics of individuals engaged in activities and interactions within a certain cultural setting can evolve and transform over a period of history. This can enable the researcher a better understanding on why certain practices and needs are defined as they are in a specific context and that different perspectives and priorities are taken in different cultures and times ( ; ).

Though field observation, particularly in Reggio-Emilia inspired centres and where children are given free reign of their imagination through encouragement and access to materials, it has been observed that the young can use the graphic and expressive languages of drawing, painting, collage and construction to record their ideas, observations, reflections, memories to further explore their understanding. Embedded in these activities are the processes of reconstructing and building on earlier knowledge so as to externalize their thoughts and what is learnt, to share their worlds with their peers and others ( ; ). The approach using ‘art as epistemology’ ( ) so that art experiences in the classroom can have both communicative and expressive goals, and the concept of art as a symbolic language is the subject of much debate. This highlights the potential of teachers facilitating children to develop the capacity in the ‘hundred language’ that is accessible to them so as to master the range of instruments and symbols ( ) that form the visual culture and an expressive language used in the curriculum. The potential for research based on visual methodologies is thus boundless.

I would like to thank niec, National Institute of Early Childhood Development, Singapore and the following teacher participant contributors Chandra Rai, Shauna Chen and Kavita Mogan.

SAGE. .)| false , M. (2011). Presenting visual research. In , 105–128. SAGE. 10.4135/9781526445933.n5.

SAGE. 10.4135/9781526445933.n5.)| false , U. , & Morris, P. A. (2006). The Bio ecological Model of Human Development. In . John Wiley.

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Oxford University Press.)| false , M. , & Ridgway, A. (2014). . .

SAGE.)| false , K. (1991). Arts as Epistemology: Enabling Children to Know What They Know. , (1), 40–51. .

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• 3.2 Researcher and Participant-generated Visual Material
• 3.3 Visual/Photo-elicited Data
• 4 Summary and Conclusions
• Acknowledgements

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Article contents

Visual and screen-based research methodologies.

• Cleo Mees Cleo Mees Macquarie University
•  and  Tom Murray Tom Murray Macquarie University, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9587-643X
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1196
• Published online: 23 May 2019

Visual and screen-based research practices have a long history in social-science, humanities, education, and creative-arts based disciplines as methods of qualitative research. While approaches may vary substantially across visual anthropology, sociology, history, media, or cultural studies, in each case visual research technologies, processes, and materials are employed to elicit knowledge that may elude purely textual discursive forms. As a growing body of visual and screen-based research has made previously-latent aspects of the world explicit, there has been a concomitant appreciation that visual practices are multisensory and must also be situated within a broader exploration of embodied knowledge and multisensory (beyond the visual) research practice. As audio-visual projects such as Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan (2013), Rithy Panh's S-21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (2003), and Margaret Loescher’s Cameras at the Addy (2003) all demonstrate, screen-based research practices are both modes of, and routes to, knowledge. These projects also demonstrate ways in which screen-based visual research may differ from research exclusively delivered in written form, most specifically in their capacity to document and audio-visually represent intersubjective, embodied, affective, and dynamic relationships between researchers and the subjects of their research. Increasingly, as a range of fields reveal that the incorporative body works as an integrated “perceptive field” as it processes sensory stimuli, visual and screen-based research practices will fulfil an important role in facilitating scholarly access to intuitive, affective, embodied, and analytical comprehension.

• multisensory knowledge
• embodied knowledge
• non-textual discourse
• visual methods
• methodology

Introduction

This article gives an overview of some visual and screen-based methods employed in social sciences, humanities, education, and creative arts research, and explores the unique ways of “knowing” that these methods enable. We begin by providing a historical account of the scholarly uses of visual methods, from their troubled and troublesome origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries , through to a more recent “visual turn” in the humanities that was driven by the increasing uptake of reflexive, sensory, embodied and participatory approaches to research, and an increasing confidence in the capacity of visual methods to facilitate such approaches. We then go on to describe several ways in which visual and screen-based methods allow researchers to engage with “forms of experience that are either un-securable or much more difficult to secure through other representational forms” (Eisner, as cited in O’Donoghue, 2012 , para. 3). We propose that these methods facilitate multisensory, embodied, personal, empathetic and locomotive routes to knowing about the world. Three examples of visual practice feature in our discussion: Rithy Panh’s documentary film, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine ( 2003 ); Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s sensory ethnography of a fishing trawler, Leviathan ( 2013 ); and Margaret Loescher’s participatory photography and video project undertaken at “the Addy,” a children’s playground in northern England ( 2003 ). In closing, we consider future developments and remaining questions in the field of visual research.

A Disciplinary Context

In acknowledgement of our own subjectivity, we thought it important to note that we write from backgrounds in documentary filmmaking, performance, and creative practice research informed by history and visual anthropology scholarship. The overview that follows reflects this in several ways.

Firstly, some terminology in this article may be described as “poetic.” This, as Leah Mercer, Julie Robson, and David Fenton ( 2012 ) note, is common in creative arts research, and can help to explain aspects of creative practice “without flattening the liveliness of . . . somatic, aesthetic [approaches]” (p. 16).

Secondly, we write from the understanding that knowledge emerges through context-specific, material practices, and that methodologies appropriate to one context may not be appropriate in others (Barrett & Bolt, 2010 ; Douglas & Gulari, 2015 ; Nelson, 2013 ; Smith & Dean, 2009 ). As such, this article does not aim to be in any way prescriptive.

A History of Visual Research Methodologies

Numerous theorists of visual research have noted the “deep distrust” and “troubled relationship” that social science disciplines have had with visual representations of their key subject areas, such as material culture, social knowledge, and human behavior (Banks, 2001 ; Collier, 1957 ; Pink, 2007 ; Ruby, 2000 ). Indeed, it has been argued that “one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century western thought” was “profound anxiety” toward vision, and its suppression and denigration in favor of textual discourse (Grimshaw & Ravetz, 2005 , pp. 5–6). This suspicion of visual methods has some logic, particularly when we consider the widely discredited 19th-century applications of visual methods (predominantly illustration and photography) employed to advance views based on the superiority of certain races and social classes. This problematic work is most closely associated with various schools of “physical” (rather than cultural) anthropology in France (Paul Broca, Alphonse Bertillon), England (Francis Galton), Germany (Ernst Haeckel, Leo Frobenius), Switzerland (Rudolf Martin), and Austria (Rudolf Pöch), to name just a few of the exponents (Evans, 2010 ; Harper, 1998 ; Morris-Reich, 2013 ). Connections between visual work, colonial aspirations, and state propaganda (particularly during times of war—see Evans, 2010 ) added to concerns regarding the compromising potential of visual materials. Some obvious examples include Leni Riefenstahl’s films in 1930s Germany, and the “Empire Marketing Board” films funded by the British government between 1926 and 1934 , where the producer, John Grierson, put his “Technic [sic] of the Propaganda film” to the creative task of marketing the produce of the British Empire (see Elliot 1931 , pp. 742–744).

Alongside associations with propagandist, racist, and other forms of discriminatory practice, visual media also came to be identified with populist forms of art and entertainment, as well as with less authoritative and intellectual sources of media production, such as tourism and journalism (Grimshaw & Ravetz, 2005 , p. 5). These were all fields with which nascent, professionalizing disciplines wanted no connection. Additionally, within anthropology at least, it has been argued that the preoccupations of mid-20th-century scholarship—with culture as an abstraction in the United States, and with social structure in Britain—had little need for visual tools and methods, as these concerns were much better suited to the analytical form of writing (Banks, 2001 ; Morphy & Banks, 1997 , p. 9). Meanwhile, in sociology, an emphasis by scholars on the statistical analysis of social patterns may account for the dearth of visual research in that field between 1920 and 1960 (Harper, 1988 , p. 58). All of this may serve to account for the 20th-century predominance of writing as a sober, trustworthy, and appropriate form of discourse in which to investigate and describe the world.

This does not mean, however, that visual documentation and the gathering of visual evidence were absent from research practices during this period. What follows is a brief and chronological account of some significant research projects that included visual materials as central to their research aims, beginning with photography in the late 19th and early 20th century .

Photography was integral to a number of early anthropological fieldwork projects, including Alfred Court Haddon’s expeditions to the Torres Strait Islands ( 1888–1899 ), Ryuzo Torii in China, Korea, and Taiwan ( 1895–1911 ), the Hamburg Ethnographic Museum’s South-Seas expedition to the “German” Pacific in 1908–1910 , and Bronislaw Malinowski’s fieldwork in Melanesia ( 1914–1918 ). While moving film was captured during this period, it was not until the 1920s and the work of U.S. documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty and his Russian contemporary Dziga Vertov that “documentary” films began to exploit narrative and descriptive capabilities of the medium that would be inspirational to later visual anthropologists, including French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch from the 1950s onward (Rouch, 2003 ). Rouch, in turn, developed a method he described as “ cinéma-vérité ” in homage to the “ kino-pravda ” movement of Vertov and others in Russia. His approach would become a key inspiration for later visual anthropologists, in particular because of its reflexive and participatory ethos (MacDougall, 1998 ).

A quick survey of other definitive visual research must suffice to complete this history. Among these must be included the 1930s work of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, who used photography to a then-unprecedented extent in their studies of culture and social organization in Bali (for a discussion on their films of this era, see Henley, 2013 ). In the 1942 work Balinese Character Bateson and Mead ( 1942 , p. xii) described their project in this way:

we were separately engaged in efforts to translate aspects of culture never successfully recorded by the scientist, although often caught by the artist . . . [our work] attempted to communicate all those intangible aspects of culture which had been vaguely referred to as its ethos. . . . By the use of photographs, the wholeness of each piece of behavior can be preserved.

From the mid- 20th century onward, John Collier’s work ( 1957 , 1967 ) was influential in establishing photo-elicitation as a research practice, while American writer Lorraine Hansberry’s photographic study of U.S. southern civil rights issues in The Movement ( 1964 ) and Bruce Davidson’s 1971 study of black “ghetto” life (Bailey & McAtee, 2003 ; Harper, 1998 ) offered examples of how photography could be used as a research tool in sociology. Paolo Freire, the Brazilian educationalist and sociologist who pioneered “dialogic pedagogy” (Freire, 1970 ), was also foundational in his use of photography in a 1973 project designed to investigate the lived experience of Peruvian slum dwellers. Freire asked his subjects to document their lives in photographs rather than in words, a project that has also been influential in the development of “participatory visual methods.”

It would be impossible to conclude a historical overview of the area without reflecting on the “crisis of representation” (Marcus & Fischer, 1986 , pp. 9–12) that engulfed anthropological discourse in the 1970s as it dealt with disciplinary fragmentation, and with accusations of being a discipline of “merely Western significance” and “colonialist” in nature (Asad, 1973 ; Winthrop, 1991 ). These concerns, allied to broader introspection as a result of participation in the Vietnam war, the publication of Bronislaw Malinowski’s diary revealing a dubious regard for his subjects, and the disclosure of clandestine use of social scientists in Latin America and Southeast Asia, precipitated a “crisis of confidence and loss of innocence” for anthropology (Ruby, 1980 , p. 154). This had significant implications for visual research, as it did for the social sciences as a whole. As Jay Ruby ( 1980 ) notes, it was no longer possible for researchers to be “shamans of objectivity” and it has since become widely appreciated that “all serious filmmakers and anthropologists have ethical, aesthetic, and scientific obligations to be reflexive and self-critical about their work” (p. 154).

In response to these challenges researchers began to develop new and increasingly reciprocal relations with their subjects, and to be more reflective about structural power dynamics, authorial positions, and “looking relations” with subjects, often leading to more shared and collaborative forms of authorship (Gaines, 1986 ; Ginsburg, 1994 , 1995 ; Michaels, 1986 ). All of these challenges would also greatly accelerate the future application of visual research practices, leading to what scholars have described as a “pictorial” (Mitchell, 1994 ) or “visual turn” in cultural research (Jay, 2002 ; Pauwels, 2000 ). In what follows, we will advance a position that this emphasis on the visual also encouraged the consideration of sensory, affective, and embodied dimensions to scholarship (Pink, 2009 , 2012 , para. 7; Rose, 2014 , p. 30).

Beyond Textual Approaches to Knowledge

Visual materials, as discussed in the section, “ A History of Visual Research Methodologies ,” have been a component of qualitative and quantitative research methods for a long time. The legitimacy and efficacy of these practices as methodological tools, however, have been an ongoing source of contention. Indeed, for most of the 20th century —if they were employed at all—visual materials and research practices were primarily understood to function as adjuncts to conceptual and text-based knowledge, useful as sources of data, or as “an audiovisual teaching aid,” as Jay Ruby ( 2000 , p. 3) put it. Skepticism of their value, and ridiculing of the idea that visual methods “might become . . . [more] than mere tools in fieldwork” have continued until recently (Wolcott, 1999 , p. 216, emphasis in original). It has become more common, however, for scholars in the social sciences, education, media studies, and creative arts to acknowledge the value of nontextual and nonverbal ways of knowing, mediating, and communicating experience. These methods can bring us into contact with the world in novel and enlightening ways, with images deployed “not merely [as] appendages to the research but rather [as] inseparable components to learning about our social worlds” (Stanczak, 2011 , para. 6).

Visual anthropologists Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz ( 2005 , pp. 5–6) make a case that the “dominance of linguistic, semiotic and textual models of interpretation” that characterized 20th-century academic practice has recently begun to erode in the face of a “more phenomenologically inflected” and “sensuous scholarship.” Indeed, the uptake of visual methods is wrapped up in a broader sensory and embodied turn in the humanities (Pink, 2012 , para. 7; Rose, 2014 , p. 30), in which the interconnectedness of the senses and the emotive, tacit, corporeal, and ineffable dimensions of knowing are deemed increasingly valid and worthy of investigation.

A problem remains, however, namely that many of these domains of human experience exist “beyond discursive reach” (Grimshaw & Ravetz, 2005 , p. 6), and attempts to investigate them through nonlinguistic means have sometimes been problematic within a “logocentric” university context (Ruby, 1996 , p. 1351). This has been particularly true of creative arts research, where “personally situated, interdisciplinary and diverse and emergent approaches” (Barrett & Bolt, 2010 , p. 2), including research presented in nontextual forms, have been challenged as (in)valid generators of knowledge.

What follows in this article is not intended as a survey of all the nontextual forms of research enquiry and dissemination that exist across performance, the creative arts, education, the humanities and social sciences in the early 21st century . Instead, we wish to concentrate on visual and “screen-based” research (we use this term in order to encompass the wide range of formats and contexts in which visual screen media can be found), in which the medium of research delivery and dissemination is itself screen-based, and in which the world is explored “through the grain” of the visual medium (MacDougall, 1998 , p. 76). For this reason, we will include three case studies of screen-based research from scholar-screen producers, including Véréna Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Rithy Panh, and Margaret Loescher. In each case the researchers describe learning about the world and discovering the essence of their specific knowledge quest through the distinctly material, sensory, and social processes of screen production. Their image-making processes were not so much “an aesthetic or scientific performance” as that they formed the very “arena of inquiry” (MacDougall, 1998 , p. 136), an idea that Lucien Castaing-Taylor ( 1996 ) put in a series of rhetorical questions more than two decades ago: “What if film not only constitutes discourse about the world but also (re)presents experience of it? What if film does not say but show ? What if a film does not just describe but depict ? What, then, if it offers not only ‘thin descriptions’ but also ‘thick depictions’?” (p. 86, emphasis in original).

In making an argument for these screen-based research projects as methodologically powerful ways of accessing previously latent understandings, and hence new knowledge, we do not wish to encourage binary oppositions between written and non-written forms of research, or between the increasingly redundant scholarly division between “theory” and “practice.” Rather, we prefer to draw attention to “all the possible variations in the way [these components] can be combined” (Mercer et al., 2012 , p. 11). This is because, in the first instance, many visual research strategies are employed to support what are ultimately text-based qualitative methods and publications (Rose, 2014 ; Stanczak, 2011 ); and in the second instance, because text-based publications can also facilitate sensory and embodied scholarly practices. Laura U. Marks’s work ( 2002 ) on “haptic criticism,” for example, proposes that writing can offer mimetic, tactile, and experiential accounts of the world that are not so much interested in arriving at clear interpretations of events as brushing up closely to experience and “[forming] multiple points of contact [with it]” (p. vx). This suggests that particular routes to knowledge do not so much rely on a choice of medium as on a particular approach to knowing and mediating. With this important qualification, we will now describe what we see as some fundamental aspects of screen-based visual research. We will illustrate these with reference to the three case studies mentioned in the Introduction to this article.

Some Characteristics of Visual “Knowing” and Screen-Based Research

Multisensory knowledge.

The multisensory nature of vision—and an appreciation of the senses as fundamental to how we understand the world and interpret and represent the worlds of others—has become increasingly significant to scholarship in the humanities and social sciences (Pink, 2009 , p. 7). This understanding has led to calls for further scholarly attention to the multisensory body as a research tool (Howes, 2003 , p. 27).

Vivian Sobchack ( 1992 ), in her work on the phenomenology of vision and the spectatorship of screen works, makes the point that “the senses . . . cooperate as a unified system of access. The lived-body does not have senses. It is, rather, sensible. . . . My entire bodily existence is implicated in my vision” (pp. 77–78). It is a point that has been numerously made since Maurice Merleau-Ponty ( 1962 ) described the body as a “synergic system” of interconnected faculties (as cited in Ingold, 2000 , p. 268) where the body works as an integrated “perceptive field” (MacDougall, 1998 , p. 50). Appreciating the interconnectivity of the senses in this way leads to an understanding of the ways in which audiovisual media offer a multisensory (rather than bi-sensory) encounter with the lives and worlds of other beings (Pink, 2012 , paras. 2–5).

As we explore in more depth later, many discussions of the interconnected functioning of the senses are additionally concerned with the way that the act of looking also facilitates a form of touching , a kind of contact with the world that involves (following Merleau-Ponty) mimesis: that is, a “resonance of bodies” that emerges through an imitation of the “postural schema” of other entities (MacDougall, 1998 , p. 53). By enabling mimetic and multisensory encounters, visual media can teach us about the world in distinctly experiential ways that are replete with affective, emotive, and ambiguous dimensions (Rutherford, 2006 , p. 136).

Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s feature-length film, Leviathan , provides a strong example of how a technically “bi-sensory” medium can convey a multisensory understanding of places, people, and processes.

Case Study : Leviathan

Carrying us from night to day, and back into night aboard a fishing trawler, Leviathan consists of a series of long takes, a roaring soundscape, and virtually no human speech. Michael Ungar’s suggestion that the film creates an audiovisual rendition of the experience of being aboard the ship (2017, p. 15) feels apt: we begin the film disoriented, clanking about in the dark, unsure of where we are, or of what we are seeing.

This state of disorientation prompts us to sensorily ascertain the parameters of our environment: its textures, forms, weight, smells, and temperatures. Visual ethnographer Sarah Pink’s argument that we use vision to make multisensory evaluations of materials (such as evaluating whether an object is hot to the touch, heavy to lift, etc.) rings true here: we use the aural and visual materials available to us to develop a multisensory understanding of an unfamiliar environment. Sound, condensation on camera lenses, and flashes of recognizable forms in the maelstrom create sensations of extreme wetness, of hard wind, and hard work. When the camera is pushed underwater, we meet the sharp edges of danger: shards of broken coral flash menacing and close, and we feel the force of water rushing past the ship’s keel. Rather than telling us about this world, the film subjects us to its sensory physicality, giving us an embodied and affective sense of its stakes, and of the elements within it.

Disorientation and ambiguity are key attributes of this work and are intentionally contrary to disciplinary norms that Castaing-Taylor has described as “the discursive and its desire for transparency” (in MacDonald, 2013 , p. 295). Paravel and Castaing-Taylor ( 2013 ) have stated that their “purpose was to give people a very potent aesthetic experience, to give them a glimpse into a reality that they haven’t had first-hand – a protracted, painful, difficult, visceral, profound embodied experience. . . . Our desire was simply to give an experience of an experience . . .” (as cited in Pavsek, 2015 , p. 6).

For those who argue that Leviathan makes a contribution to scholarly knowledge, as we do, its value exists in what each of us extract from this “experience.” Anna Grimshaw ( 2011 ), for example, has argued that it opens “a space between the experiential and propositional, between the perceptual and conceptual” (pp. 257–258), which it does through a disavowal of conventional codes of semiotic screen-based meaning, such as forms of direct address to the audience (voice-over, text, interview), or indirect address through on-screen characters. We are asked to construct meaning through our own sensory experience of the film rather than through a “semiotic coding and decoding” that co-director Paravel believes, “cuts off viewers from the pro-filmic world in the very act of seeming to provide them with authoritative knowledge about it” (as cited in interview with Alvarez, 2012 , para. 13).

Empathetic, Mimetic, and Embodied Knowledge

The notion that looking becomes a sort of touching (mentioned in the sub-section “ Multisensory Knowledge ”) is significantly based on the idea of kinesthetic empathy: the idea that when we look at movement, we are able to mimic that movement in our own bodies and establish a kind of physical contact with it. Knowledge of the world thus emerges from what Anna Gibbs ( 2010 ) calls a “ borrowing of form that might be productively thought of as communication” (p. 193, emphasis added), or even what Sarah Pink ( 2009 ) has called “(audio)visual sensory apprenticeship” (para. 1). This idea is significant because it points to another way in which screen-based research might communicate with audiences.

A central feature of kinesthetic empathy is what neuroscientists Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra call “embodied simulation.” This revolves around the activity of mirror neurons in the brain. When a person watches other humans (or animals, or entities) do things—like eat an apple or jump up and down—their mirror neurons fire in exactly the way that they would if they were doing that thing themselves, producing a physiological, empathetic response (Gallese & Guerra, 2012 , p. 184). As Karen Nakamura ( 2013 ) notes, theories of kinesthetic empathy dovetail with theories of synesthesia (or, the ways sensory information can flow across, or trigger, multiple sensory channels at once) (p. 135), further bolstering our understanding of the human body as a “unified system of access” to the world (Sobchack, 1992 , p. 77).

The concept of kinesthetic empathy also has a strong basis in philosophical thought. Philosopher David Abram ( 1996 ), for example, invokes the work of Merleau-Ponty to imagine an epistemology that does not so much aim to achieve a “mastering” overview of the world, as to participate with it. This means entering into a physical “conversation” with things, working with them and mimicking them, such that we “enter into a sympathetic relation with [the world]” and achieve an “attunement or synchronization between [our] own rhythms and the rhythms of the things themselves” (p. 54). In such an epistemology, the sensible is not comprehended by us, but rather “animate[s]” us, and “thinks itself within [us]” (p. 55). Anne Rutherford ( 2003 ), in a similar spirit, describes the effect of mimesis as “a kind of contact—a mode of sensory, tactile perception that . . . closes the gap between the spectator and image” (p. 127). Looking thus provides, through a process of empathy and attunement, a shared sense of physical locomotion as a way of getting closer to the experiences of other entities.

It is important, however, to note the ethical complexities that surround the notion of “empathy”—achieved either through mimetic processes, or any other method. As feminist scholar Sandra Bartky argued in her book, Sympathy and Solidarity ( 2002 ), our capacity to gain access to the experiences (and particularly the suffering) of others will always remains limited. And if, by putting ourselves in the shoes of others, we partially overwrite their experience with our own, then perhaps empathy is not always appropriate, or sufficiently respectful of others’ difference. Such concerns must continue to be explored in accounts of the communicative capacities of audiovisual media.

By accepting this qualification, the significant idea here is that moving with or like the world teaches us about it in an intimate, embodied way, and has the capacity to bring forth both new and remembered knowledge. This might happen through the physical retracing of particular movement pathways in the body and in place (Pink & Leder-Mackley, 2014 , p. 147), through re-enacting or performing historical events (Dening, 1996 ; McCalman & Pickering, 2010 ; Pink & Leder-Mackley, 2014 ) and, as we have described earlier in this section, through the kinesthetic, empathetic, mimetic act of looking.

The potential of movement to bring about new and remembered knowledge is foundational to the visual and re-enactment methods employed in the making of Rithy Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine ( 2003 —henceforth S-21 ), as well as to its knowledge claims.

Case Study : S-21

S-21 reunites perpetrators and victims of state-sanctioned torture at the titular “S-21” prison during the repressive rule of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 . Panh has explained that the visual methods he used for the film were founded on a belief in the powerful ways that multisensory environments, actions and gestures, and (audio)visual materials could function as “footholds” in the process of knowing and remembering (Oppenheimer, 2012 , p. 244). In the film, the former guards of the Khmer Rouge–run S-21 prison are faced with the enormous challenge of recalling, describing, and reflecting on their crimes. The following account by Panh shows how central the revisiting of sensory states, locations, and actions was to accessing repressed, traumatic, and often ineffable memories:

I met Paul, who does the re-enactment in the film, in his native village. And I understood that this man wanted very much to explain what he had done at S21. But he couldn’t get round to explaining it properly, all his phrases were cut off. So at a certain moment I brought him a map of the camp. And so he said, “oh yes, I was a guard in this part of the building.” So then he was able to explain, but in doing that he made the gestures that you see in the film, which completed the phrases he couldn’t discuss. And it’s then that I discovered that there was another memory, which is the bodily memory. . . . Sometimes the violence is so strong that words don’t suffice to describe it. . . . So it was then that I said to the guard “you can use gestures, you can speak, explain it in any way you wish.” And then that I had the idea [sic] of taking the guard back to S21, which is now a museum of the genocide, and because the guard said that he worked at night there, I took him there at night. I asked at the museum how the building was lit at night—it was lit only by neon—so I cut all the other lighting and just put the neon up there. I sought to create an atmosphere, which recalled the situation, which the guard was actually working in. Sometimes at night they had the radio on with revolutionary songs so that’s why the radio came into it, with the revolutionary songs. . . . I made him listen to the songs. . . . It’s like giving somebody a foothold to get up a mountain. He needs to have these grips . . . in order to achieve what he’s setting out to do, which is to describe his own testimony. (Oppenheimer, 2012 , p. 244)

In addition to recording the film at the location where the atrocities occurred, re-creating sensory and physical environments, and inviting his participants to re-enact what they did as a means to remembering it, Panh also used elicitation devices such as the sprawling archive of photographs, logbooks, and other documents that remained from the prison as props to facilitate remembering (Oppenheimer, 2012 , p. 245). Sensory encounters with these artifacts supported participants in the process of testifying. In the film, we see these processes at work. We see the former prison guards enter the former cells, yell at, handcuff, physically assault, and escort imaginary (and/or remembered) prisoners; we see them leaf through and recite from the logbooks and other archival materials provided by the filmmakers. Doing these tasks helps the guards to start talking about the unspeakable things they participated in many years ago, reflecting Gillian Rose’s observation ( 2014 ) that visual methods allow participants and researchers access to not only aspects of experience that are multisensory, but also to affective or feelingful experiences that are ineffable (p. 28), or difficult to talk about.

Panh’s belief in the power of mimicry to produce empathy and understanding meant that he refused to enter the prison cells with the guards when they were re-enacting their routines. The prisoners had (historically) been chained to the floor, lying down in rows like sardines—and so to walk into the room, Panh, said, would have been akin to stepping on them, throwing into question his moral position as a filmmaker. As Panh put it: “it was instinctive to stop, to hold the camera at the door, not to follow in. Otherwise we’d be walking over the prisoners, if you like. And would knock over into the side of the guards. . . . If I had done, ‘who would I be?’” (Oppenheimer, 2012 , p. 245).

It was a space in which Panh did not belong, either historically or in the process of re-enactment. He literally had no place there, and in the dynamic of re-enactment—which is an environment of mimicry and empathy where affects and emotions might spill from body to body through shared physical movement (Gibbs, 2010 )—his presence would confuse and disturb. His presence would also demand that he be a social “actor,” in which case Panh’s question, “who would I be?” describes a powerful (and impossible) ethical rhetoric. Such dilemmas get to the heart of the methods used in S-21 to access and represent the events of the past in mimetic, embodied, and affective ways.

Screen-Based Research Is Informed by Material Contexts and Is Process-Driven

In much early- 21st-century visual and creative practice research, it is accepted that research outcomes follow from the material contexts and processes of production. This is to say that “thinking” and “making” require material tools, and interactions between these materials and the subjects of research are part of a dynamic that influences both the research processes and outcomes of the work (as argued by Paul Carter in Material Thinking [ 2004 ]). This is also to appreciate that research materials (for example, a camera, a screen) can serve as both the means of investigation, and the means of research dissemination, and that these have their own capacities and limitations.

As just one example, the camera’s ability to objectify others, and the capacity for the embodied presence of researchers and their instruments to shape events and distort “pro-filmic” reality, has been amply noted (Bruzzi, 2000 ; Gaines, 1986 ; MacDougall, 1998 ; Mulvey, 1975 ; Rouch, 2003 ). The critical concept here is that the space between subject and camera/operator is an inherently “intersubjective” and dynamic one. The act of recording and rendering a subject—the particular way in which a place is materialized on screen for example—is in itself a description of the circumstances and decision-making processes embedded (and embodied) within the moment of capture. Sarah Pink ( 2007 ), for example, suggests that the places she films consist of multiple interweaving trajectories, including the trajectory of the camera. In her definition of place (which draws on definitions put forward by Tim Ingold and Doreen Massey), places are not fixed, but reconstituted moment by moment, depending on these variously moving entities and trajectories.

Trinh T. Minh-ha also describes the image capturing process in distinctly relational terms, calling it “an intrinsic activity of image-making and of relation-forming.” She writes that “the subject who films is always caught in the process of relating—or of making and re-presenting—and is not to be found outside that process” (Lippit & Minh-ha, 2012 , para. 15–19). Jean Rouch would agree that the camera instigates many of the movements and responses it captures. For him, the “fundamental problem in social science,” namely that “you distort the answer simply by asking a question” (Georgakas, Gupta, Janda, & Rouch, 1978 , p. 22), must be embraced and openly examined in the screen works one makes.

One outcome of this reflexive awareness is a growing tendency to prioritize participatory and participant-led modes of screen research—methods where subjects have agency to negotiate, and even direct the ways they are represented (Ruby, 1996 , p. 1350). In such approaches, the screen researcher is required to share the filmmaking process with the subjects of the research, and to operate with a “willingness to be decentred in acts of translation” (Clifford, 2000 , p. 56).

Such practices not only help to redress the historical power imbalances implicit in visual and social research, they can also provide a unique form of knowledge in that they record, and give material form to, the negotiation of knowledge and representation between researcher and subject. As Rose ( 2014 ) points out, “taking a photo always entails some sort of negotiated relationship between the person making the image and those being pictured” (p. 29), and the resulting image can, if the researcher allows for it, bear the very imprint of that negotiation. The traces of negotiations surrounding representation, power, and knowledge embedded in participatory visual media may offer us unique routes to thinking about these issues.

All of the case studies invoked in this article were profoundly informed by material and relational processes of production (see Oppenheimer, 2012 , p. 243, and MacInnis, 2013 , p. 60), and the following case study offers an insight into how the materials employed within the research project were part of a negotiated and process-driven method of research.

Case Studies: Cameras at the Addy

Margaret Loescher’s visual ethnography project at “the Addy,” an adventure playground in Hulme, northern England, provides a good example of a collaborative ethnography, in which the subjects have been allowed forms of agency in which to represent themselves. The project explored the ways children navigate and make use of urban spaces, and resulted in the production of a photo essay, a documentary film, and reflective writing.

When Loescher ( 2003 ) set out to film her six- to eight-year-old subjects at play in “the Addy” in an observational style, she noticed that they would—against her intentions—constantly perform to her camera, drawing on pop culture references and in fact using the camera as a “doorway into the world of ‘pop’ culture” (p. 79). After a period of inner resistance to this, she gave the children disposable cameras to represent their own lives and play. Upon looking at the composition of the photographs the children took, she learned that when they were performing to the camera, they were not trying to be someone “other” than their authentic selves, and that these performances were in fact ways of self-identifying in a contemporary, media-saturated cultural landscape, and of “forging relationships with their urban [play] environment” (p. 80).

In addition to the children’s unexpected response to her camera, Loescher’s choice to give them disposable cameras to record their own lives was driven by a discomfort with her own relative power to represent the subjects of her research, particularly given the substantial differences in age and class that she noted between them (p. 77). She reflects that giving the children disposable cameras did something to shift the power balance. Armed with cameras of their own, “[the children] are learning about [the camera] as much as it is learning about them.” This “disarms the camera as a force of categorization and potential oppression and pulls it into the children’s world. It becomes another thing which signifies them as social agents, like the television, the mobile telephones, the football ground and the pop-star poster [that feature] in the photographs taken by the children” (p. 84).

Loescher’s work also foregrounds the sometimes uneasy negotiation of knowledge and representation between researcher and subject, and provides an example of how this might occur “through the very grain of the filmmaking” (MacDougall, 1998 , p. 76). At the beginning of her screen work she includes a recording of her initial interaction with one of her subjects, six-year-old Ainsley. She recalls that this meeting had “an air of uncertainty and mistrust” about it. “I am wondering what this boy is ‘about’. I want to know him and he wants to know me; but I am unsure on what basis we will be ‘knowing’ each other” (Loescher, 2003 , p. 77). A negotiation of the terms on which subject and researcher would “know” each other was then undertaken with and through the camera, and included in public documentation of the research.

Loescher’s work provides a particularly vivid example of a process-driven methodology that is strongly influenced by the interpersonal and material process of recording still and moving images with her subjects. Cameras at the Addy reflects the ways that visual methods are both informed by, and constructive of, relational (and social, and therefore ethical) encounters. Knowledge emerges from these encounters, and resides in them as they unfold.

Event-Based Knowledge

Visual research methods, and screen-based research in particular, can constitute forms of knowing through events rather than through concepts. Addressing observational approaches to documentary and ethnographic filmmaking in particular, MacDougall ( 1998 ) writes:

By focusing on discrete events rather than abstract concepts . . . and by seeking to render faithfully the natural sounds, structure, and duration of events, filmmakers have hoped to provide the viewer with sufficient evidence to judge the film's larger analysis. . . . [These films] are essentially revelatory rather than illustrative, for they explore substance before theory. (p. 126)

MacDougall is here describing the ways in which screen media forms can capture and represent the inherent ambiguity of events and entities and resist clear-cut conclusions about them. MacDougall ( 2006 ) writes that “what we show in images . . . is a different knowledge, stubborn and opaque, but with a capacity for the finest detail. . . . This puts (film) at odds with most academic writing, which, despite its caution and qualifications, is a discourse that advances always toward conclusions” (p. 6).

While images may promise insight and overview (rendering their subjects legible and subject to interpretation), they may equally come with minimal guidelines for how they should be read, and may even resist interpretation—as Laura U. Marks ( 2002 ) has argued in her work on the “haptic” for example. This approach to rendering experience is evident in visual research works like Leviathan . It has been argued that this “different knowledge,” which is inherently subjective and events-based, also signals “a significant epistemological, philosophical, and aesthetic shift . . . founded in a new approach to the world that respect[s] its materiality, its continuity, and fundamental ambiguity” (Grimshaw, 2011 , p. 255). It should be noted that the quality of being ambiguous—or “downright mysterious” as Catherine Russell’s ( 2005 ) critique of Leviathan describes it (p. 28)—is not universally appreciated. Some critics see in this work a conscious “disavowal” of meaning-making, and are concerned about the ethical implication of viewers left to make “sense of that world on their own terms” (Pavsek, 2015 , pp. 8–9). What is certain is that a scholarship that foregrounds “revelation,” and embodied, affective, and sensory experience over discourses of explanation and illustration is unconventional and challenging to traditional scholarship.

Leviathan presents events in a way that some have argued is “analogous to the experience of the filmmaker at the ethnographic site” with a seeming absence of contextualizing that might “clarify or conceptualize that experience” (Ungar, 2017 , p. 14). The lack of obvious discursive strategies, and the “openness” (Russell, 2015 , p. 28) of the authorial and narrative structure leads commentators such as Allan MacInnis to reflect that the film does not seem to have the same “polemical intent” as other films dealing with the suffering of animals in the meat industry. Rather, he feels that the film presents animal death and suffering with a “mixture of brutality and beauty,” which “opens [his] thoughts” (MacInnis, 2013 , pp. 58–59), delaying moral judgement and emphasizing the complexity of its subject(s).

Indeed, in Leviathan , blood flies as marine animals are hacked unceremoniously to pieces, but the film does not seem to incriminate fishermen, or even make clear-cut judgements about fishing as an industry. This could be because the film’s composition frustrates attempts to extract messages or social/political meanings from it (Thain, 2015 , p. 44). This is not only due to the absence of spoken or written guidelines for interpretation (for, as Russell [ 2015 [ notes, “visual and audio material can also be textual” [p. 32]), but also due to the ways the moving images and sounds are assembled to create a landscape of “productive disorientation[s]” (Thain, 2015 , p. 42). As viewers, we may be so consumed with the process of keeping ourselves afloat in the film’s immersive flood of sensory information, that the additional work of judging what we are sensing becomes a lesser priority. Or perhaps it is that the extended, intimate moments we have with the fishermen themselves “amplify” (Rutherford, 2006 , p. 153) our sense of both their unknowability (or opacity), and their humanity.

In fact, the same might be said of the approach to filming the former Khmer Rouge guards in S-21 . In both films, the choice to express (or preserve) the temporal dimension of specific concrete events (a fishing trawler at sea, re-enacted historical scenes) may allow subjects to transform under our sustained gaze. A significant knowledge-based implication of this strategy may be that this kind of scholarship “opens up” contemplative spaces regarding the subjects and “pro-filmic” world being represented to us, rather than configuring a form of knowledge that advances quickly “towards conclusions” (MacDougall, 2006 , p. 6).

Future Developments, Remaining Questions

The final section of this article will make some brief propositions regarding future directions and remaining questions in the area of visual and screen-based research methods.

It seems to us that the ubiquity of screen-based knowledge delivery (despite the continuing dominance of textual discourse in the early 21st century ), together with a growing confidence in the unique knowledge-creation capacities of visual screen-based media methods, as discussed in this article, will facilitate greater instances of audiovisual, nontextual knowledge production. Some of the forms this knowledge production will take are bound to challenge conventional ideas of what constitutes “scholarly knowledge.”

It may be that the knowledge contribution of research incorporating re-enacted, embodied, sensory, affective, and experiential concerns will be sufficiently discrete from existing research categories that new ones are demanded, such as Brad Haseman’s case for “performative” research methods (2006, p. 98), that would stand alongside quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Haseman defines “performative” research outputs as those that embody or enact the questions and concerns they are “about.” These do not need to be delivered in traditional textual form. Yet, much of this “knowledge” may just as easily fall into existing categories of discursive practice—for there is no reason that audiovisual texts be any less “discursive” (putting aside the specific merits and demerits of forms of “discourse”) than written ones.

Much of the research discussed here, and the various “turns” of cultural and scholarly attention, point to a growing diversification of research methods. To take just one example only briefly discussed: the methods that might follow from the concept of knowing as something that emerges in a context-specific process of making (Smith & Dean, 2009 ). In relation to this idea, Tim Ingold ( 2011 ) suggests that in a world consisting of materials on the move —where things do not so much have properties as that they have histories (p. 30)—we can imagine that there will be new epistemological challenges to the things we know, and to our methods for coming to know them.

This article has highlighted research that invites ambiguity, heterogeneity, and uncertainty (Barrett & Bolt, 2010 ; Haseman, 2006 ; Nelson, 2013 ), and debates will certainly continue about the scholarly potential of this kind of research. Ross Gibson ( 2010 ), for example, has noted that responding to experimental and experiential research that often seeks to reveal “tacit” understandings (see Polanyi, 1966 for a description of “tacit knowledge”) of the kind that we have described, requires an “acknowledgement” (a shift in knowledge) that necessitates new critical and analytical strategies of comprehension. We must enable ourselves, he writes, to be “immersed and extracted, involved yet also critically distanced” (Gibson, 2010 , p. 10). In other words, Gibson informs us, the consumption of this research requires both discipline and reflection, and sometimes contradictory processes of intuitive, affective, sober, embodied, and analytical comprehension. The challenge, both for researchers and for those seeking to gain access to the knowledge communicated in these forms of research, is to “entwine the insider’s embodied know-how with the outsider’s analytical precepts” (Gibson, 2010 , p. 11). Paul Carter ( 2010 ), writing in response to claims of a lack of “rigor” in research he describes as “aleatory,” wonders if it is not, on the contrary, “a sign of its sophistication” that this work remains “constitutionally open” in comparison to scientific approaches that “identif[y] power with abstraction and the dematerialisation of thought from the matrix of its production” (p. 16).

As ever, much revolves around questions of support for such practices in a university context (Barrett & Bolt, 2010 ; Carter, 2010 ; Haseman, 2006 ; Nelson, 2013 ; Van Loon, 2014 ), and the ways in which academic cultures, institutions, and governments respond to the challenges of shifting epistemologies and methodologies that seek to investigate the world.

Finally, persistent questions about the ethics and politics of using images will continue to be important as image-making technologies and global political and media landscapes continue to evolve. The ethical dimensions of representation, and of what we do with visual technologies, must always remain integral to the contemplation and revision of visual and screen-based research methods.

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The Handbook of Visual Analysis

• Theo Van Leeuwen - University of Southern Denmark
• Carey Jewitt - University College London, UK
• Description

The Handbook :

· Offers a wide-range of methods for visual analysis: content analysis, historical analysis, structuralist analysis, iconography, psychoanalysis, social semiotic analysis, film analysis and ethnomethodology

· Shows how each method can be applied for the purposes of specific research projects.

· Exemplifies each approach through detailed analyses of a variety of data, including, newspaper images, family photos, drawings, art works and cartoons.

· Includes examples from the authors' own research and professional practice.

The Handbook of Visual Analysis which demonstrates the importance of visual data within the social sciences offers an essential guide to those working in a range of disciplines including: media and communication studies, sociology, anthropology, education, psychoanalysis, and health studies.   Introduction Philip Bell Content Analysis of Visual Images Malcolm Collier Approaches to Analysis in Visual Anthropology Martin Lister and Liz Wells Seeing beyond Belief   Cultural Studies as an Approach to Analyzing the Visual Theo van Leeuwen Semiotics and Iconography Gertraud Diem-Wille A Therapeutic Perspective The Use of Drawings in Child Psychoanalysis and Social Science

`This is the book on visual analysis I have been waiting decades to see. Written by the leading visual analysts of our time, this book gives not only the substance of their analyses, but tells us how they do their work as well. From content analysis to cultural studies, film and photography to anthropology, if you do visual analysis, this is a handbook you will want on your bookshelf' - Ron Scollon, Georgetown University

The Handbook of Visual Analysis is an essential read and first entry point into the field of visual analysis. As such it provides a very good overview of different methods and methodological approaches, offering comprehensible examples of how to apply the methods to the material.

Valuable book that well supplements other qualitative research methods' textbooks. The chapters on content analysis and drawings have been very useful to inform my teaching at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

This is a useful book, one that provides a good overview to a wide range of methods for visual analysis. Although its individual chapters are extremely useful in their own right as introductions to these diverse methods, it is very unlikely that a single module would cover all these different approaches. As a consequence, the usefulness of the book lies more on these individual chapters than in the book as a whole.

This book is a seminal work that film and media scholars and students must engage with. It offers a detailed alternative to semiotics proper and is ideal for analysing film and media texts (including political advertisements, both print and tv/youtube) with a focus on the political, ideological and cultural.

A very useful text to support the assessment for the Visual Communication module which requires learners to evaluate the appropriateness of different methodologies to the analysis of a specific visual/ document including visuals. It provides a useful overview of methodologies as well as illustrating these with case studies.

This is the only book I can find with comprehensive information on visual and content analysis.

This handbook provides students (and researchers) with a useful overview of different approaches to visual methods and - importantly - analysis. I will be recommending students who undertake visual approaches in their MA research to engage with this text.

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2 Visual and Contextual Analysis

J. Keri Cronin and Hannah Dobbie

The study of visual culture relies on two key skill sets: visual analysis and contextual analysis.

Visual Analysis

Visual Analysis is just a fancy way of saying “give a detailed description of the image.” It is easy to assume that visual analysis is easy or that it isn’t necessary because anyone can just look at the image and see the same thing you see. But is it really that simple?

As individual viewers we all bring our own background, perspective, education, and ideas to the viewing of an image. What you notice right away in an image may not be the same thing your classmate (or your grandmother or your neighbour) notices. And this is perfectly fine!

What do you see when you look at the images below?

In all three cases we have pictures of cows, but there are some important similarities and differences. What do you think is important to note about these images?

Reflection Exercise

Take a 5-10 minutes to jot down a detailed description (visual analysis) for each of the images above.

• What do you notice?
• What do you see?
• What part of the image is your eye drawn to first?
• How are these images similar? How are they different?

Contextual Analysis

Contextual analysis is another very important skill for studying images. This is a fancy way of saying “we need more information about this picture.” You will often have to do external research to build and support your contextual analysis. There is an old saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but we need to think carefully and critically about this. A picture can not tell us everything we might want to know about it! Sometimes it is very important to dig deeper through research to learn more about an image in order to understand how it participates in the meaning making process.

Here is a list of some questions that are useful for guiding contextual analysis. This is not an exhaustive list and not all questions will apply in all cases:

•   Who made this image? Why?
•   Where was the image made? (In a different part of the world? In a laboratory? On the beach?)
•   Who was the intended audience for this image?
•   Where was the image meant to be viewed? (A textbook? A gallery? As part of a movie set? In a family photo album?)
•   When was this image made? How do you know?
•   What kinds of technologies were used to make this image? What kinds of limitations were there on this technology at this time?
•   Is there text in the image? If so, how does it shape our understanding of what we are looking at? What about the image caption? How does it shape our understanding of what we are looking at?

Sometimes you can get clues from the image that can help you answer these kinds of questions, but often you will have to branch out and turn to books, articles, websites, documentary films, and other resources to help build and develop your contextual analysis.

In our examples above the captions give us quite a bit of information. We learn, for instance, who made the pictures (and, in one case, we learn that this information isn’t known). We learn when the images were made and the type of pictures they are–although we may need to look up what an etching , stereograph , or an albumen print is. The titles are fairly descriptive in that they provide us some basic information about what we are looking at.

Reflection Exercise – Part II

The visual analysis we just did combined with the information provided in the image captions gives us a place to start with our investigation into these images. But are many things that we still don’t know about these pictures.

What other things might we want to know if we were going to write about these pictures? Take a few moments and jot down a list of questions you have about these images.

As we generate questions based on these images and then start to do the research to find out the answers to those questions we are starting to build our contextual analysis. Through research we would learn, for instance, that the firm of Underwood & Underwood was a leading manufacturer of stereograph cards in the 19th century and that stereograph cards had a massive public and commercial appeal . The two images, when viewed through a special device known as a stereoscope , merge together to form an image that looks 3-D. Imagine how exciting this would be for viewers in an age before television, movies, and video games. Some have even described this as an early form of virtual reality !

Further research will show us that Edward H. Hacker was a printmaker in Britain in the 19th century and that he was best known for creating engravings of animal pictures. In an era when it wasn’t easy to reproduce paintings, this allowed multiple copies of an image to be shared and circulated. In our example, above he is reproducing a painting by William Henry Davis , an artist who specialised in portraits of livestock.

Today it might seem odd to us that people would want pictures painted of their cows and we might even wonder why someone would hire a printmaker to make reproductions of these images. Why would people want images of their cows? And further, why does the cow in the first picture above look so strange? She is so enormous that her little tiny, skinny legs couldn’t possibly support her body. What is going on here? Did Davis now know how to paint cows?

In fact, Davis was a well-respected artist. The answer to this question can be discovered through a bit of research (more contextual analysis). As we dig into this investigation, we would soon learn that this type of picture was part of a larger 19th trend for creating images of livestock that exaggerated their features as a way to advertise certain breeds and breeders . In other words, the farmers that were commissioning these images were using these pictures to try and prove that their animals were better than the animals owned by competing farmers. These pictures can not be separated out from the economics of 18th and 19th century British farming practices.

In 2018 the Museum of English Rural Life posted a photograph of a very large ram with the words “look at this absolute unit.” This Twitter post went viral and brought a lot of attention to the history behind these kinds of images. Having a picture like this circulate on social media brought a new layer of meaning to the photograph . It didn’t replace the original context, but it added to the discussions about it.

When an image is taken out of its original context new meanings can be generated. Take, for example, a controversial advertising campaign launched in the spring of 2023 by the Italian government . It features the very recognizable central figure from Sandro Botticelli’s 15th century painting known as “ Birth of Venus .” But in this campaign she is out and about enjoying the tourist sites in Italy, playing the role of Instagram influencer. This campaign provoked a strong reaction and many people criticised what they saw as trivialising and making a mockery of a beloved work of art. The associations people have with this painting–that it is a “masterpiece” to be admired and venerated–have fueled this criticism. If the central figure in these advertisements was not a recognizable figure it is unlikely that there would have been any controversy at all. By taking this figure out of context and putting her in AI generated scenes of Italian tourism, some feel it changes the meaning of the original picture. Love it or hate it, the one thing everyone agrees on is that this campaign has generated much discussion!

Visual and Contextual Analysis Exercise

Find a picture that you think expresses something about who you are. It can be from your childhood, a photograph of your dorm room, or a picture of the aunt who taught you how to read. Perhaps it is a picture of you cheering on your favourite sports team or of a special dinner shared with close friends. It doesn’t matter what the subject is as long as it is an example of a picture that you think says something about you.

Step 1 (Visual Analysis): Write a description of this picture. Try to stick to only description in this step, really look at the picture carefully and consider things like:

• What medium is it (e.g.: is it a photograph, a painting, etc.)?
• What colours are used?
• How is it composed? How big is it?
• Are there people in the image?
• Is the image dark or light?
• What is in the background?
• Is there anything blurry or unclear?

*Note: This is not an exhaustive list of questions. Rather, they are given as examples to help you think about what kinds of things to focus on.

Step 2 (Contextual Analysis): Imagine you are going to show this picture to a complete stranger, someone who doesn’t know you at all. Make a list of everything you think that person needs to know about the picture in order to learn a bit about you? What information might help that person understand why this picture is meaningful for you? For example, was this photograph taken on your birthday? Is it a picture of your first pet? Is the person who is blurry in the background your best friend who moved away when you were 11? Then think about why these things are important to you. In other words, what do you know about this picture that wouldn’t be obvious to someone else?

If I were doing this exercise with this photograph, in step #1 I would focus on things like the colour of the child’s clothing, the size of the dog, and the way the adult, child, and dog are posed, including that the man has one hand on the child, one hand on the dog. I would talk about it being a photograph and how the faded tones suggest that this is an old photograph. I would note that the photograph was taken outside and that these three are standing on what appears to be pavement but that there are trees in the background. There is also what appears to be a wooden sign in the background but it is too blurry to read. I would also point out that the shadows on the ground indicate that it was a sunny day, but the type of clothing the two human figures are wearing suggests that it was also a cold day.

If I were to continue on and complete step #2 I would list that this was a photograph taken in the mid-1970s by my mother and that it is a picture of me (Keri) and my uncle with a dog we happened to meet in the parking lot of Mount Robson Park while our family was moving from British Columbia to Alberta. This was not our dog. We had never met him before nor did we ever see him again. But he was friendly, and I was absolutely enthralled by how fluffy he was. My uncle took me over to introduce me to the dog, staying close to make sure the dog didn’t hurt me.

This picture holds meaning for me for a number of reasons. First of all, it is an early example of my love of animals. Secondly, Mount Robson Park is part of the Canadian Rocky Mountains and was often a destination for family vacations. These trips shaped my interest in nature and outdoor activities in spaces like Provincial and National Parks. This led to me deciding to write my MA thesis on the visual culture of these kinds of places, a document that was eventually turned into a book . And lastly, this picture has taken on a new layer of importance for me lately as my uncle pictured here recently died of cancer. Even though it isn’t a great picture in terms of technical quality, it is a picture that I have framed in my house because it holds a lot of meaning for me.

By doing this exercise you are slowing down the process of meaning making and thinking about how the visual elements of the image relate to the larger context that helps to shape why this picture holds meaning for you. You can see how the two types of analysis–visual and contextual–work together. You need both halves of this equation. By slowing down and doing some deep noticing in our visual analysis, we can notice things that become significant when we switch over to contextual analysis. And our contextual analysis can provide us a starting place for further research if needed.

With this exercise you were working with an image that you are already very familiar with. But this same process can get repeated with any image. When you are working with an image that isn’t from your own personal life, there will likely be more steps needed to arrive at a contextual analysis–research, further reading, etc.–but the process itself remains the foundation for critical thinking about images.

Look Closely: A Critical Introduction to Visual Culture Copyright © 2023 by J. Keri Cronin and Hannah Dobbie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

For immediate release | March 10, 2021

An introduction to visual research methods

CHICAGO — “ Visual Research Methods: An Introduction for Library and Information Studies ,” published by Facet Publishing and available through the ALA Store, is the first book to focus on visual methods in LIS, providing a comprehensive primer for students, educators, researchers, and practitioners in the field. Visual research methods (VRM) comprise a collection of methods that incorporate visual elements such as maps, drawings, photographs, videos, as well as three-dimensional objects into the research process. In addition, VRM including photo-elicitation, photovoice, draw-and-write techniques, and cognitive mapping are being leveraged to great effect to explore information experiences to investigate some of the central questions in the field; expand theoretical discussions in LIS; and improve library services and spaces. Contributed chapters in the book showcase examples of VRM in action and offer the insights, inspirations, and experiences of researchers and practitioners working with visual methods. Edited by Shailoo Bedi and Jenaya Webb, this book’s coverage includes:

• an introduction to visual research methods including discussion of terminology;
• an overview of the literature on VRM in libraries;
• methodological framing including a discussion of theory and epistemology;
• practical and ethical considerations for researchers embarking on VRM projects;
• chapters showcasing VRM in action including drawing techniques, photographic techniques, and mixed methods; and
• six contributed chapters each showcasing the results of visual research methods, discussions of the techniques, and reflections on VRM for research in information studies.

Dr. Bedi works at the University of Victoria (UVic) as both Director, Academic Commons and Strategic Assessment with the Libraries as well as Director, Office of Student Academic Success with Learning, Teaching Support & Innovation. Her research interests include the construction and issues of identity for racialized minority leaders, as well as student experience with learning spaces, student research creation, and visual research methods. Webb is the Public Services and Research Librarian at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) Library at the University of Toronto. Since completing her MLIS at the University of Toronto, she has worked to bring visual methods and approaches to the library context to explore user experience, wayfinding, and meaning-making in library spaces.

Facet Publishing , the commercial publishing and bookselling arm of CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, is the leading publisher of books for library and information professionals worldwide. Many book retailers and distributors are experiencing service disruptions or delays, including Amazon. For speediest service, order direct from the ALA Store. ALA Store purchases fund advocacy, awareness and accreditation programs for library and information professionals worldwide. ALA Editions | ALA Neal-Schuman publishes resources used by library and information professionals, scholars, students, and educators to improve programs and services, build on best practices, enhance pedagogy, share research, develop leadership, and promote advocacy. ALA authors and developers are leaders in their fields, and their content is published in a variety of print and electronic formats. Contact ALA Editions | ALA Neal-Schuman at [email protected].

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How to Interpret the Meaning of an Image

This week, we practice using our skills of visual analysis and learn how to “read” deliberately constructed images.

We instantly and often subconsciously interpret the meaning of images every day without realizing it. Symbols and icons are visual shortcuts for a creator to communicate meaning and message to an audience. Beyond symbols, however, more complex imagery and visual relationships between an image’s various features can similarly produce meaning, though this meaning may be more open to interpretation.

In some cases, familiar subjects, contents, or contexts facilitate almost instantaneous recognition of an image’s message. When these features are less familiar, in other words when we are more distant from the original intended audience, interpretation must be a conscious choice. In this scenario, all that we’ve discussed over the last six articles— approaching works , medium ,  context , elements of design , principles of composition , and symbols —can be leveraged to interpret meaning and nuance through and beyond an image’s initial visual impact.

Visual analysis and interpretation can be used to approach any image, but here we examine images that are meant to communicate a particular message, not just to illustrate or adorn text.

Some images are created for a narrow audience, and the creator assumes that viewers will have only casual or brief interactions with the image. This makes an image’s meaning more direct and apparent. This admissions poster from Grand Valley State College is targeting applicants for their future teachers program. It relies only on line and greyscale to communicate with the audience. Loose symbols like the book under the figures’ arm identify this person as a student. There is a clever but simple visual construct that creates meaning for the audience: as the viewer, we are placed in the position of a prospective student, looking at a poster of a current student, looking at a poster of a future teacher. This poster tells the audience that the path to being a future teacher is through this event and enrollment in the program.

When an audience is larger, such immediate recognition of meaning often requires text and symbolism to support understanding. Attention-grabbing illustrated magazine covers are a prime example of this. Early Life magazine covers employ very different iconography and symbolism to communicate with their early 20th century audience, who would have likely made sense of the images quickly while passing a newsstand. In the first, portraits of William Howard Taft and James Sherman would have been as recognizable to the audience as Teddy Roosevelt’s signature glasses and the American symbols that create his mouth and mustache. While the message would have been clear to the magazine’s audience at the time, visual analysis of the image reveals to us the same message: after eight years as president, Roosevelt was staring down the future of America and his future out of the White House.

Another Life magazine cover from 1909 takes a more abstract but no less recognizable approach to communicating its message. Rather than using direct symbols, it employs broader symbolic metaphors like bountiful fruit and long-living trees to craft a scene of enduring love. The illustrator’s choice to render the figures in soft pencil shades and to obscure the figures’ faces further reinforces this image of timeless, universal love. Such an image can be widely read beyond its initially intended audience, but closer investigation of its visual components reveals the deliberate, thoughtful choices made that allow the image to resonate so easily and immediately.

As images are initially created with a particular audience in mind, sometimes we are too removed from that audience or context to easily interpret them. Meaning is shaped by factors beyond what is initially visible. While close looking can unlock some understanding of meaning and sentiment, contextual information is often necessary when the image’s intent is less immediately accessible to us. In this illustration from Harper’s Bazar , we can get fairly close to the meaning behind the image through close looking. The arrangement of the figures in both sides of the image allows us to quickly read these as a comparison or perhaps parallel circumstances. Even with limited knowledge of Western culture, the details and flourishes that abound in the left of the image reveal that this is likely a comparison between high- and lower-class women, a juxtaposition that the figures’ activities seem to confirm.

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Without more information, this is likely as far as most viewers would get towards understanding this image’s message. However, contextual information in the image itself gives us a big hint. The captions read: “The long and short of it”, “short dresses”, and “long hours”, alerting us to the important features of the images. Looking again, we see that the central figure on the left is, indeed, wearing a skirt that reveals her shoes while engaging in some sort of social activity, whereas the central figure on the right is wearing a skirt that pools around her ankles on the floor as she sews. Now we have a clearer understanding of this image as a commentary on the dress of women reflecting their social and occupational status.

Visual analysis and image investigation unlocks meaning in a visual work, but what if the meaning that we read into an image is not what the creator intended or what initial audiences understood? Especially with historical images, modern audiences may bring context and perspective to their analysis of visual works that the original audience did not have; their interpretation might be anachronistic.

The images we considered in this column were intended to communicate a direct and specific message, something not true of many images you might encounter in the real world. In the next column, we’ll explore how to analyze visual art and compare works’ visual components and context.

Develop your visual literacy skills. Follow the Learning to Look column here.

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Home » Content Analysis – Methods, Types and Examples

Content Analysis – Methods, Types and Examples

Table of Contents

Content Analysis

Definition:

Content analysis is a research method used to analyze and interpret the characteristics of various forms of communication, such as text, images, or audio. It involves systematically analyzing the content of these materials, identifying patterns, themes, and other relevant features, and drawing inferences or conclusions based on the findings.

Content analysis can be used to study a wide range of topics, including media coverage of social issues, political speeches, advertising messages, and online discussions, among others. It is often used in qualitative research and can be combined with other methods to provide a more comprehensive understanding of a particular phenomenon.

Types of Content Analysis

There are generally two types of content analysis:

Quantitative Content Analysis

This type of content analysis involves the systematic and objective counting and categorization of the content of a particular form of communication, such as text or video. The data obtained is then subjected to statistical analysis to identify patterns, trends, and relationships between different variables. Quantitative content analysis is often used to study media content, advertising, and political speeches.

Qualitative Content Analysis

This type of content analysis is concerned with the interpretation and understanding of the meaning and context of the content. It involves the systematic analysis of the content to identify themes, patterns, and other relevant features, and to interpret the underlying meanings and implications of these features. Qualitative content analysis is often used to study interviews, focus groups, and other forms of qualitative data, where the researcher is interested in understanding the subjective experiences and perceptions of the participants.

Methods of Content Analysis

There are several methods of content analysis, including:

Conceptual Analysis

This method involves analyzing the meanings of key concepts used in the content being analyzed. The researcher identifies key concepts and analyzes how they are used, defining them and categorizing them into broader themes.

Content Analysis by Frequency

This method involves counting and categorizing the frequency of specific words, phrases, or themes that appear in the content being analyzed. The researcher identifies relevant keywords or phrases and systematically counts their frequency.

Comparative Analysis

This method involves comparing the content of two or more sources to identify similarities, differences, and patterns. The researcher selects relevant sources, identifies key themes or concepts, and compares how they are represented in each source.

Discourse Analysis

This method involves analyzing the structure and language of the content being analyzed to identify how the content constructs and represents social reality. The researcher analyzes the language used and the underlying assumptions, beliefs, and values reflected in the content.

Narrative Analysis

This method involves analyzing the content as a narrative, identifying the plot, characters, and themes, and analyzing how they relate to the broader social context. The researcher identifies the underlying messages conveyed by the narrative and their implications for the broader social context.

Content Analysis Conducting Guide

Here is a basic guide to conducting a content analysis:

• Define your research question or objective: Before starting your content analysis, you need to define your research question or objective clearly. This will help you to identify the content you need to analyze and the type of analysis you need to conduct.
• Select your sample: Select a representative sample of the content you want to analyze. This may involve selecting a random sample, a purposive sample, or a convenience sample, depending on the research question and the availability of the content.
• Develop a coding scheme: Develop a coding scheme or a set of categories to use for coding the content. The coding scheme should be based on your research question or objective and should be reliable, valid, and comprehensive.
• Train coders: Train coders to use the coding scheme and ensure that they have a clear understanding of the coding categories and procedures. You may also need to establish inter-coder reliability to ensure that different coders are coding the content consistently.
• Code the content: Code the content using the coding scheme. This may involve manually coding the content, using software, or a combination of both.
• Analyze the data: Once the content is coded, analyze the data using appropriate statistical or qualitative methods, depending on the research question and the type of data.
• Interpret the results: Interpret the results of the analysis in the context of your research question or objective. Draw conclusions based on the findings and relate them to the broader literature on the topic.
• Report your findings: Report your findings in a clear and concise manner, including the research question, methodology, results, and conclusions. Provide details about the coding scheme, inter-coder reliability, and any limitations of the study.

Applications of Content Analysis

Content analysis has numerous applications across different fields, including:

• Media Research: Content analysis is commonly used in media research to examine the representation of different groups, such as race, gender, and sexual orientation, in media content. It can also be used to study media framing, media bias, and media effects.
• Political Communication : Content analysis can be used to study political communication, including political speeches, debates, and news coverage of political events. It can also be used to study political advertising and the impact of political communication on public opinion and voting behavior.
• Marketing Research: Content analysis can be used to study advertising messages, consumer reviews, and social media posts related to products or services. It can provide insights into consumer preferences, attitudes, and behaviors.
• Health Communication: Content analysis can be used to study health communication, including the representation of health issues in the media, the effectiveness of health campaigns, and the impact of health messages on behavior.
• Education Research : Content analysis can be used to study educational materials, including textbooks, curricula, and instructional materials. It can provide insights into the representation of different topics, perspectives, and values.
• Social Science Research: Content analysis can be used in a wide range of social science research, including studies of social media, online communities, and other forms of digital communication. It can also be used to study interviews, focus groups, and other qualitative data sources.

Examples of Content Analysis

Here are some examples of content analysis:

• Media Representation of Race and Gender: A content analysis could be conducted to examine the representation of different races and genders in popular media, such as movies, TV shows, and news coverage.
• Political Campaign Ads : A content analysis could be conducted to study political campaign ads and the themes and messages used by candidates.
• Social Media Posts: A content analysis could be conducted to study social media posts related to a particular topic, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, to examine the attitudes and beliefs of social media users.
• Instructional Materials: A content analysis could be conducted to study the representation of different topics and perspectives in educational materials, such as textbooks and curricula.
• Product Reviews: A content analysis could be conducted to study product reviews on e-commerce websites, such as Amazon, to identify common themes and issues mentioned by consumers.
• News Coverage of Health Issues: A content analysis could be conducted to study news coverage of health issues, such as vaccine hesitancy, to identify common themes and perspectives.
• Online Communities: A content analysis could be conducted to study online communities, such as discussion forums or social media groups, to understand the language, attitudes, and beliefs of the community members.

Purpose of Content Analysis

The purpose of content analysis is to systematically analyze and interpret the content of various forms of communication, such as written, oral, or visual, to identify patterns, themes, and meanings. Content analysis is used to study communication in a wide range of fields, including media studies, political science, psychology, education, sociology, and marketing research. The primary goals of content analysis include:

• Describing and summarizing communication: Content analysis can be used to describe and summarize the content of communication, such as the themes, topics, and messages conveyed in media content, political speeches, or social media posts.
• Identifying patterns and trends: Content analysis can be used to identify patterns and trends in communication, such as changes over time, differences between groups, or common themes or motifs.
• Exploring meanings and interpretations: Content analysis can be used to explore the meanings and interpretations of communication, such as the underlying values, beliefs, and assumptions that shape the content.
• Testing hypotheses and theories : Content analysis can be used to test hypotheses and theories about communication, such as the effects of media on attitudes and behaviors or the framing of political issues in the media.

When to use Content Analysis

Content analysis is a useful method when you want to analyze and interpret the content of various forms of communication, such as written, oral, or visual. Here are some specific situations where content analysis might be appropriate:

• When you want to study media content: Content analysis is commonly used in media studies to analyze the content of TV shows, movies, news coverage, and other forms of media.
• When you want to study political communication : Content analysis can be used to study political speeches, debates, news coverage, and advertising.
• When you want to study consumer attitudes and behaviors: Content analysis can be used to analyze product reviews, social media posts, and other forms of consumer feedback.
• When you want to study educational materials : Content analysis can be used to analyze textbooks, instructional materials, and curricula.
• When you want to study online communities: Content analysis can be used to analyze discussion forums, social media groups, and other forms of online communication.
• When you want to test hypotheses and theories : Content analysis can be used to test hypotheses and theories about communication, such as the framing of political issues in the media or the effects of media on attitudes and behaviors.

Characteristics of Content Analysis

Content analysis has several key characteristics that make it a useful research method. These include:

• Objectivity : Content analysis aims to be an objective method of research, meaning that the researcher does not introduce their own biases or interpretations into the analysis. This is achieved by using standardized and systematic coding procedures.
• Systematic: Content analysis involves the use of a systematic approach to analyze and interpret the content of communication. This involves defining the research question, selecting the sample of content to analyze, developing a coding scheme, and analyzing the data.
• Quantitative : Content analysis often involves counting and measuring the occurrence of specific themes or topics in the content, making it a quantitative research method. This allows for statistical analysis and generalization of findings.
• Contextual : Content analysis considers the context in which the communication takes place, such as the time period, the audience, and the purpose of the communication.
• Iterative : Content analysis is an iterative process, meaning that the researcher may refine the coding scheme and analysis as they analyze the data, to ensure that the findings are valid and reliable.
• Reliability and validity : Content analysis aims to be a reliable and valid method of research, meaning that the findings are consistent and accurate. This is achieved through inter-coder reliability tests and other measures to ensure the quality of the data and analysis.

Advantages of Content Analysis

There are several advantages to using content analysis as a research method, including:

• Objective and systematic : Content analysis aims to be an objective and systematic method of research, which reduces the likelihood of bias and subjectivity in the analysis.
• Large sample size: Content analysis allows for the analysis of a large sample of data, which increases the statistical power of the analysis and the generalizability of the findings.
• Non-intrusive: Content analysis does not require the researcher to interact with the participants or disrupt their natural behavior, making it a non-intrusive research method.
• Accessible data: Content analysis can be used to analyze a wide range of data types, including written, oral, and visual communication, making it accessible to researchers across different fields.
• Versatile : Content analysis can be used to study communication in a wide range of contexts and fields, including media studies, political science, psychology, education, sociology, and marketing research.
• Cost-effective: Content analysis is a cost-effective research method, as it does not require expensive equipment or participant incentives.

Limitations of Content Analysis

While content analysis has many advantages, there are also some limitations to consider, including:

• Limited contextual information: Content analysis is focused on the content of communication, which means that contextual information may be limited. This can make it difficult to fully understand the meaning behind the communication.
• Limited ability to capture nonverbal communication : Content analysis is limited to analyzing the content of communication that can be captured in written or recorded form. It may miss out on nonverbal communication, such as body language or tone of voice.
• Subjectivity in coding: While content analysis aims to be objective, there may be subjectivity in the coding process. Different coders may interpret the content differently, which can lead to inconsistent results.
• Limited ability to establish causality: Content analysis is a correlational research method, meaning that it cannot establish causality between variables. It can only identify associations between variables.
• Limited generalizability: Content analysis is limited to the data that is analyzed, which means that the findings may not be generalizable to other contexts or populations.
• Time-consuming: Content analysis can be a time-consuming research method, especially when analyzing a large sample of data. This can be a disadvantage for researchers who need to complete their research in a short amount of time.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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Knowledge mapping of impulsive buying behavior research: a visual analysis using CiteSpace

• Xiyun Gong   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6614-9711 1 ,
• Choy Leong Yee 1 ,
• Shin Yiing Lee 1 ,
• Ethan Yi Cao   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6271-8857 2 &
• Abu Naser Mohammad Saif   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7078-6780 1 , 3  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  967 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Business and management

With the development of e-commerce, impulse buying behavior has transitioned from offline to online, presenting significant exploration value. This study aims to provide a comprehensive knowledge map and in-depth analysis of research on impulsive purchase behavior, helping readers understand the latest global trends in this field from 1967 to September 30, 2023. The study offers a visual analysis using CiteSpace, encompassing 704 academic articles on impulsive buying behavior published over 55 years. The status is revealed through collaboration networks, co-citation networks, and trend analysis. Researchers explore impulsive buying behavior in various contexts, with “e-commerce” being a primary focus. Notable new keywords include technology, customer satisfaction, perceived value, and virtual reality, among others. These terms contribute to future research directions. Overall, this pioneering research combines visual analysis to provide valuable insights and research recommendations for academics studying impulsive buying behavior.

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Introduction.

Impulse buying refers to unplanned purchases, and this buying habit is sudden and immediate (Nigam et al., 2023 ). Over the last decades, researchers have examined impulsive buying behavior from different perspectives according to its significance (Wang et al., 2022b ; Xiao and Nicholson, 2011 ). Impulse buying accounts for 39% of the total revenue generated by department stores based on past research (Miao et al., 2020 ). In addition to this, Goel et al. ( 2022 ) and Lin and Chuang ( 2005 ) discovered that eighty percent of customers buy on impulse at least occasionally. According to Moreira et al. ( 2017 ), purchasing items in physical stores may involve greater impulse buying than purchasing items online. Because offline shopping engages all five senses, while online shopping cannot replicate certain immediate experiences, such as touch, smell, and taste.

Because of the growth of e-commerce, impulsive buying may now be observed in online shopping as well (Hellemans et al., 2022 ). With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media, and mobile commerce, the number of studies related to online impulse buying in the digital age is rapidly increasing. According to the eMarketer report ( 2019 ), global e-retail sales are predicted to grow from US$ 3.535 trillion in 2019 to US$ 6.542 trillion by the end of 2023, accounting for 22% of total retail sales. This growth is driven by the increasing use of mobile devices and internet shopping. Additionally, a 2021 survey indicated that more than 80% of online buyers had made an impulse purchase at least once, accounting for over 40% of the total amount of money spent online by customers using e-commerce applications (Saleh Al-Omoush et al., 2021 ).

After 2020, the global COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent lockdowns prompted customers to participate in more online purchasing, which may have led to an increase in online impulse purchases (Goel et al., 2022 ). According to the literature record, during the pre-COVID period, e-buying represented 40% to 50% of all purchases; during the COVID-19 pandemic, it rose to 90% to 95% (Saleh Al-Omoush et al., 2021 ). Furthermore, the development of information technology fosters the growth of e-commerce, which has exacerbated impulsive purchasing behavior in the online environment (Zhao et al., 2022 ). As social networking sites (SNS) like Facebook, Weibo, and Meituan have developed, more and more customers and businesses have come to understand the value of social commerce (Xu et al., 2020 ). Over 70% of online purchases, according to a social commerce report, are affected by social commerce websites (Xu et al., 2020 ; Jingdong and Nielsen, 2017 ). Additionally, research into the live-streaming market and impulsive purchases are rapidly growing. In Asia, the percentage is higher (30%) than the global average of 16% of online buyers who make direct product purchases through live-streaming platforms, particularly in Thailand (51%), India (32%), Malaysia (31%), and China (27%) (Peng et al., 2021 ). Furthermore, live shopping may provide online customers with an easier shopping environment, and it may also encourage impulse buying behavior. Moreover, this study gives academics a basic idea of how this field will be researched in the future.

Therefore, research on impulse buying has always been at the forefront of the times and the world. Thus, this current study seeks to fully comprehend the research by using CiteSpace’s knowledge mapping. Many fields have used knowledge mapping extensively to offer a comprehensive and unbiased perspective of a particular study topic (Fang et al., 2018 ). However, over the years, some literature articles on impulse buying have been published by scholars (Verma and Yadav, 2021 ; Xiao and Nicholson, 2013 ). Besides, some research has examined IBB from the standpoint of meta-analysis (Zhao et al., 2022 ; Iyer et al., 2020 ). Current studies still lack a visual perspective. Thus, we conducted a scientometric analysis using CiteSpace 6.1 to provide an overview and visual analysis of the subject, clearly showing the bibliometric characteristics and visualizing relationships of articles published on this topic in reputable scholarly journals indexed in Web of Science (WoS) from 1967 to the end of September 2023. In addition, the following research questions put forward by us:

Q1: What is the current development trend of impulse buying behavior in the world?

Q2: What is the future direction of impulse buying behavior, and which fields are predicted to be most influential based on the highest citations and keywords?

Q3: What are the newly introduced theories and models regarding impulsive buying behavior within the current collaboration networks and emerging trend analysis, compared to similar types of articles?

The structure of this article is as follows. First, it begins with a review of impulsive buying behavior. This is followed by an explanation of the materials and methods used. Next, the results of the collaboration network, co-citation network, and future trends of impulsive buying behavior are presented. Finally, the conclusion section summarizes the entire article and includes a discussion.

Impulsive buying behavior (IBB)

As time has progressed, authors in the field of impulsive buying behavior have presented varying definitions and interpretations. Stern ( 1962 ) defined impulsive buying behavior as any purchase that a shopper makes without prior planning. Rook ( 1987 ) described impulse buying as a purchase behavior driven by a strong and irresistible urge. Rook and Fisher ( 1995 ) characterized buying impulses as part of a hedonically complex process. Later, Kacen and Lee ( 2002 ) explained impulse buying behavior as a spontaneous purchase characterized by moderately quick decision-making and a subjective desire for immediate possession of the goods. Sharma et al. ( 2010 ) discourse that impulsive buying denotes a relatively fast and hedonically complex purchasing behavior, which means that the impulse leading to the purchase being made omits any careful, deliberate evaluation of alternative or future consequences. Furthermore, they also highlight the term “impulsive buying,” which refers to a quick and hedonistically complicated purchasing behavior, meaning that the surge that led to the purchase was uninformed and did not consider any other options or potential future results. Based on the opinions of the authors mentioned above, this article comes to the following general conclusion. Impulse buying is regarded as unplanned purchasing, characterized by sudden and immediate decisions. It is defined as a more thrilling, tempting, dynamic, and instantaneous buying behavior compared to planned purchasing.

Traditional studies on impulse buying have classified contributing elements as either internal or external (Iyer et al., 2020 ; Kalla and Arora, 2011 ; Wansink, 1994 ; Xiao and Nicholson, 2013 ). Regarding internal factors, the most common ones are related to consumers, such as impulse buying propensity, pre-purchase emotions (Ozer and Gultekin, 2015 ), consumer characteristics, gender, age, motivations, and emotions. For external factors, environmental considerations like window displays and store design are widely studied by scholars (Gudonavičienė and Alijošienė, 2015 ). Moreover, previous research on impulse buying can be categorized into two types. The first type analyzes the potential consequences of impulsive shopping behavior (Dittmar and Drury, 2000 ; Rook, 1987 ; Vohs and Faber, 2007 ). The other type is pertinent to the factors that determine impulsive buying behavior, such as culture (Miao et al., 2020 ), self-interpretation (Zhang and Shrum, 2009 ), and the kinds of foods that are eaten (Mishra and Mishra, 2011 ). With the progress of the times, IBB has been gradually classified into online and offline categories (Goel et al., 2022 ). Still, the research on online impulse buying only started 20 years ago, and this part has excellent potential. Based on the enormous economic benefits behind impulse buying, the current research factors need to be continuously explored, and finding the latest research trends is conducive to innovation.

Material and methodology

Data sources.

The Web of Science (WoS) core collection was used to gather all relevant information. The WoS Citation database, created by American Thomson Reuters, is a platform for information retrieval. The primary indexes are the Science Citation Index Expanded, the Social Science Citation Index, and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. This database includes over 9,000 academic publications from internationally renowned and significant academic journals (Abati et al., 2021 ; Liao et al., 2018 ). Thus, we obtained the WoS Core Collection’s data because this database is recognized as one of the most essential literature indexes in the world (Saif et al., 2022 ). In this research, we primarily focused on the element of consumer behavior. Then, we used the keywords “impulsive buying” or “impulse buying” or “impulsive consumption” or “impulsive purchase” or “impulse purchase” or “impulse shopping” or “ impulsive shopping “ or “customer impulse purchasing” or “unplanned purchase” or “sudden purchasing behavior” to search for relevant papers. The term “impulse buying” was included in all literature investigations, whether in the keywords or abstracts. As far as we know, the first article concerning impulsive buying behavior was published in 1967, so we considered materials published between 1967 and 2023 (Data collection ended on September 30, 2023). Book chapters, review articles, and editorial materials were eliminated to obtain high-quality research papers; this left 704 articles that might move on with further analysis.

Knowledge mapping

According to Cui et al. ( 2017 ), knowledge mapping is a part of bibliometrics analysis, which is defined as “the quantitative analysis of publications in a given field.” Extracting and visually reorganizing the knowledge from several previously published scientific research documents is the aim of mapping and analyzing scientific knowledge (Chen, 2013 ). Fang et al. ( 2018 ) consider that knowledge mapping aids academics in having a better understanding of the intellectual structure in a particular field of study and research status. In bibliometrics analysis, keyword analysis can show the hot research topics and future research paths. The data on authors, journals, institutions, and nations can assist other academics in identifying the authors who have contributed the most to a field or the institutions that are the most authoritative (Chen and Liu, 2020 ). The most important analysis in bibliometric studies is co-citation, as it can reveal the relationships between articles. High citation rates and numerous links to other articles indicate highly relevant and significant work (Small, 2003 ).

CiteSpace 6.1 software was used to do the visualization for this research. Professor Chen of Drexel University proposed CiteSpace, a Java-based application package (Cheng et al., 2021 ). CiteSpace quantitatively analyzes the literature in specific disciplines and bases its analysis and visualization of emerging patterns and trends in the body of scientific knowledge on the co-citation analysis theory and the pathfinder, minimum spanning trees method (Chen et al., 2008 ; Fan et al., 2020 ). In recent years, CiteSpace has been utilized by academics from various fields, such as marketing, environment, tourism, and so on (Geng and Maimaituerxun, 2022 ; Yao et al., 2020 ; Li et al., 2017 ). Analytical goals are represented by nodes (often circles) in CiteSpace’s graph. The value of a node increases with its size. The multicolored links between the various nodes display their relationship, with the various colors denoting different publishing years.

Research outputs and their categories

As shown in Fig. 1 , the development of articles on impulse buying behavior published over 55 years (1967–2022) is presented in chronological order. The initial publication on impulse buying dates back to 1967. Subsequently, the number of publications about this topic appears to have experienced a relatively gradual growth over the years that followed. From 2008 to 2011, growth occurred; however, it marginally increased. From 2016 to 2019, it fluctuated twice before reaching 53 in 2019 from 46 in 2016. Since then, publications on impulse buying behavior have increased dramatically. These data also suggest that the rising number of publications reflects a growing interest among scholars in impulse buying behavior.

The figure, which denotes the number of published papers on impulsive buying behavior between 1967 and 2022, is constructed by a curve chart.

Furthermore, Fig. 2 presents the top ten subject categories, including “Business” (312 articles, account for 27.5%), “Management” (104, 9.2%), “Computer Science Information Systems” (59, 5.2%), “Psychology Multidisciplinary” (53, 4.7%), “Economics” (40, 3.5%), “Hospitality Leisure Sport Tourism” (37, 3.3%), “Information Science Library Science” (30, 2.6%), “Information Science Library Science” (30, 2.6%), “Computer Science Interdisciplinary Applications” (25, 2.2%), “Operations Research Management Science” is associated with 24 articles (2.1%), while “Environmental Studies” and “Environmental Sciences” both have 23 articles each in tenth place, representing 2% of all publications. The distribution of the top ten subjects suggests that the study of impulsive buying behavior is an interdisciplinary one. It exhibits close ties with various disciplines, including environmental science, computer science, psychology, and management.

The figure denotes annual article output in the 10 subject categories is constructed by a colorful stacked chart.

Over the past two decades, online impulse purchasing has drawn much scholarly attention and created publishing opportunities (Bashar et al., 2022 ). The rapid development of information technology has facilitated the speed of e-commerce growth in the last few years, which amplified impulsive buying behavior in an online setting (Zhao et al., 2022 ). Therefore, impulse buying is closely related to the field of computer science information systems, which is especially reflected in social commerce, live-streaming, artificial intelligence (AI), etc. First, it is about social commerce. Based on the background of WeChat social commerce, Chen et al. ( 2019b ) offer a model to investigate the impact of product recommendations on social media on users’ impulsive purchasing tendencies. Under the context of the C2C Facebook “buy and sell” group, Chen et al. ( 2016 ) did an online experiment and found that higher textual information quality and numbers of “likes” can usually increase consumers’ urge to buy impulsively. Second, for the live-streaming portion, Jiang and Cai ( 2021 ) created a live e-commerce supply chain pricing model with online influencers regarded as retailers. Moreover, this model examines the influence of customers’ satisfaction levels and impulsive purchasing patterns. Besides, two pieces of research explore the antecedents of live-streaming under the stimulus-–organism–response framework. One is to take the consumption vision and telepresence as the organism to link with the urge to buy impulsively (Khoi et al., 2023 ). The other put perceived enjoyment and perceived usefulness in the organism part to connect with the urge to buy impulsively. It is worth noting that the research of Zhang et al. ( 2023 ) combines artificial intelligence with live-streaming shopping. It tested the influence of artificial intelligence-driven virtual influencers by investigating the underlying emotional mechanisms and persuasive factors that influence audiences’ parasocial interaction and impulse purchase intentions and confirmed the assessment-emotion-action scheme. Furthermore, it highlights the significance of the AI workforce applied to retailing and marketing managers.

In addition, as impulse buying becomes more widespread, people investigate the underlying mechanisms. As a result, more academics are using psychological models and theories to explain this behavior. The theory of planned behavior and stimulus-organism-response theory were used by most scholars to define impulsive buying behavior (Vazquez et al., 2020 ; Wu et al., 2020 ). Additionally, some researchers use the cognitive-affective personality system theory to investigate why impulsive purchases occur in emergencies and crises (Xiao et al., 2022 ). Similarly, based on the regulatory focus theory and emotion-cognition-behavior loop, Yu ( 2022 ) investigated the function of cognitive traits in modulating the relationship between unpleasant emotions and impulsive purchases during the COVID-19 epidemic. Third, a large part of related articles in the field of economics is about COVID-19. During the COVID-19 epidemic, scholars worldwide have studied related impulse buying behaviors because shopping is closely associated with the economy. Ahmed et al. ( 2020 ) investigate patterns of impulsive purchases made by US residents during the COVID-19 epidemic in key US cities and conclude that COVID-19 is a crucial moderator of this behavior. Likewise, Küçükkambak and Süler ( 2022 ) focus on the Turkish consumer as the target audience and find people’s fear of COVID-19 impacts compulsive and impulsive buying behaviors. Gupta et al. ( 2021 ) research on Indian consumers’ impulsive buying behavior during COVID-19 shows that the COVID-19 pandemic had a major effect on consumer purchasing behaviors, as evidenced by stockpiling and impulsive purchases.

Finally, regarding the Hospitality Leisure Sport Tourism discipline, currently, some studies have incorporated time scarcity (Li et al., 2021 ) or time pressure (Sohn and Lee, 2017 ) into exploring tourists’ impulsive behavior. What’s more, Chen et al. ( 2019a ) provide a model that demonstrates how website quality (as determined by hedonic value) influences impulsive purchasing behaviors in online tourism, along with some recommendations. Compared with the disciplines mentioned, impulsive buying research in tourism is fewer; however, it is valuable for scholars to explore it deeply. Currently, wireless technology is used in tourism and hospitality services. Therefore, to increase sales, tourist and hospitality businesses must better comprehend the connection between technology and impulsive buying (Ahn et al., 2020 ).

Consequently, the research on impulse buying behavior has progressed with the progress of times, and there has been a phenomenon of continuously extending from the field of management and business to Computer Science Information Systems, Psychology Multidisciplinary, Economics, Hospitality Leisure Sport Tourism, and other fields.

The collaboration of impulsive buying behavior

Country collaboration network.

Between 1967 and 2023, the country collaboration network, depicted in Fig. 3 , comprises 70 nations and 182 linkages. Countries have established a relatively mature cooperation network based on their close ties in this field. Table 1 lists the top 10 countries in terms of frequency which shows that the USA and Mainland China both have the highest frequency with 164 articles. However, the centrality score of 0.58 with the USA surpasses that of China by 2.23 times. Next, the countries ranked in descending order of publication frequency are India (85 articles), Taiwan, and China (62 pieces). It is noteworthy that despite South Korea and England having 34 articles each, their centrality differs greatly. Although the number of articles in Malaysia does not exceed 30, its centrality is 10 times that of South Korea.

The figure denotes country collaboration network based on impulsive buying behavior research for the year from 1976 to 2023.

Institution collaboration network

Figure 4 shows the 413 nodes and 262 lines that make up the institution collaboration network from 1967 to 2023. There is cooperation between the agencies, but it is not close. Most of these networks are now made up of small groups. Because of this, it is understood that the subject is still developing and not fully developed. However, we are aware that there are two groups of institutions that have a close relationship based on the links between institutions. One includes Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Great Lakes Institute Management, and Beijing Institute of Technology. The other is Florida State University and Kyung Hee University.

The figure denotes institutional collaboration network based on impulsive buying behavior research for the year from 1976 to 2023.

As can be seen from the table ranking the top 10 institutions by number of papers, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University has published the most articles on impulsive buying (10), closely followed by Great Lakes Institute Management (8), New York University (7), Beijing University of Posts & Telecommunications (6), Washington State University (6), Beijing Institute of Technology (5), Florida State University (5), Kyung Hee University (5), Michigan State University (5), University of Minnesota (5) and University of Valencia (5). Five of these institutions are from the US, three are from China, and the rest are from India, South Korea, and Spain.

As the ranking indicated in Tables 1 and 2 , the top three countries are the United States, China, and India. The following section elaborates on the reasons for the countries’ ranking in Table 2 from the chronological order displayed in the WoS database and the external factors.

Firstly, in 1967, the United States was the first country to publish research on impulsive purchase behavior, 25 years far ahead of second-ranked England (the first research published time is 1992). Many influential studies on offline impulse buying emerged during this period. It has been estimated that almost 90% of customers occasionally make impulsive purchases in the United States (Awan and Abbas Nayyar, 2015 ). In a word, impulse buying is part of American culture.

Between 2000–2009, countries such as South Korea, China, Indonesia, and Australia began to enter the initial research period. In terms of publication growth rate, most countries are developing very steadily except China, which is the fastest-growing of these countries. There are three reasons to explain this: First, China ranked second in the world’s most populous country. Population, on the one hand, determines its purchasing power, which emerges in a lot of study cases; on the other hand, it indicates there will be more research to publish in this field. Second, China’s e-commerce has been in a stage of rapid development since 2003, and online shopping has become mainstream. Bashar et al. ( 2022 ) found that the number of articles published on online impulsive buying behavior in China is 2.88 times that of the United States, which is over 2 times more than the multiple of articles published in this research (The ratio of the number of articles published by China and the United States in this article is 1.38). From this vantage point, it is also more determined that research on Chinese consumers’ impulsive buying behavior has been mainly influenced by the rise of online shopping. Third, in June 2000, the China Electronic Commerce Association (CECA) was established, which means that the Chinese government greatly values the growth of e-commerce.

In 2010, Asian countries, such as Malaysia, Pakistan, and India, started to research this area progressively, and India has the highest publication growth rate among the three. One of the reasons is that it currently has the largest population in the world. Besides, out of 30 emerging economies, India is ranked as the “second most attractive retail destination” globally (Mehta and Chugan, 2013 ). By 2025, the Indian consumer market is anticipated to have quadrupled, placing it among the world’s top five economies (Cheng, 2014 ). As for Malaysia, from 2012 to 2014, five major e-commerce platforms, including Lazada, Zalora, Rakuten, etc, joined in, which drove the online shopping market of this country (Kiu and Lee, 2017 ).

In conclusion, the ranking publishing numbers shown in Tables 1 and 2 are closely related to each country’s culture, time of internet development background, and population base.

Author collaboration network

Figure 5 (since the CiteSpace software automatically reversed the order for the first and last name of the author, the name order in this paragraph has been corrected) displays the 492 authors and 423 collaboration links for the impulsive buying behavior study between 1967 and 2023. Only a few authors in the study on impulse buying behavior demonstrate tight collaboration, and overall, there isn’t much academic interaction. The top ten authors of linked papers are listed in Table 3 , along with their names. For instance, Jiangsu University’s Umair Akram has contributed more to this area and has written six articles. One of the first scholars to study Internet impulse purchasing was Umair Akram. He classified conventional and online impulsive buying behavior to let subsequent readers research more clearly; at that time, most studies researched traditional impulse buying behavior exclusively (Akram et al., 2017 ). Additionally, he researched the environmental effects of social commerce in China and how the survey website’s quality influences online impulse buying behavior, etc., offering multiple perspectives on China’s online retail industry (Akram et al., 2018 ). The number of articles contributed by Professor Bharadhwaj Sivakumaran is 5, ranking after Umair Akram. He is currently working at SRM University. It’s worth noting that his articles have a high-impact factor, meaning his research significantly contributes to impulse buying. He can think outside the box and explore impulse buying from the perspective of service and store environment (Mohan et al., 2013 ; Sharma et al., 2014 ). He can consider the standpoint of consumers and advise them on how to alleviate or lessen impulsive buying when most researchers are researching how impulse buying benefits marketers (Upadhye et al., 2021 ), which has a certain amount of innovative value. Next, the writers who contributed four articles to the table are J Jeffrey Inman, Sanjeev Prashar, T Sai Vijay, and Chandan Prasad. Finally, the writers who published three articles were Zubair Akram, Shobhit Kakaria, and Muhammad Kaleem Khan. Research on impulse buying is currently in a developmental phase, characterized by a relatively limited number of authoritative scholars in the domain. Umair Akram and Bharadhwaj Sivakumaran currently represent academics who study impulse buying. Among them, Bharadhwaj Sivakumaran focused on impulse buying behavior in India and cross-cultural comparison, whereas Umair Akram mainly researched impulsive buying behavior in China.

The figure denotes author collaboration network based on impulsive buying behavior research for the year from 1976 to 2023.

Co-citation network for documents

Figure 6 represents the co-citation network for documents, which, between 1967 and 2023, contained 983 references and 3649 co-citation relationships. The clusters were labeled using the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) with the title extraction and indexing terms. It is commonly used and advised to utilize LLR, one of the algorithms, to extract cluster labels from the cited literature at various locations (Fang et al., 2018 ). The document co-citation networks silhouette scores are all higher than 0.7, which suggests the clusters have dependable quality. Based on the clusters in the impulsive buying realm, the following section is divided into four parts: Changes in times, social platforms and their extensions, product types for impulse buying, and consumers’ impulsive buying factors.

The figure denotes document co-citation network based on impulsive buying behavior research for the year from 1976 to 2023.

First, it is about Changes in time. As Fig. 6 shows, Cluster #1 COVID-19 (silhouette score = 0.975, cited mean year is 2019) ranks second in the size comparison. It is a known fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the world economy and healthcare, instilling fear, terror, and uncertainty in the hearts of billions of people (Islam et al., 2021 ). During this period, people make crazy impulse purchases of necessities, food, fitness products, etc. In this regard, scholars worldwide have explored Covid-19 and impulse buying. Naeem ( 2021 ) showed that fear of illness, fear of empty shelves, concern of price increases, and social pressure to buy extra items to justify staying at home enhanced panic and impulsive shopping behavior among consumers. Similarly, the study of Anas et al. ( 2022 ) found that the two main factors influencing consumers’ impulsive purchasing decisions during COVID-19 were fear and the availability of resources. Furthermore, based on the view of Chiu et al. ( 2022 ), it was evident that the perception of COVID-19 had a positive impact on fear, which in turn contributed to impulsive purchases of exercise products. In general, although COVID-19 has passed, these connected studies continue to offer insights into fear-induced panic impulsive buying, and future studies might further explore the relationship between negative emotions and impulse buying.

Next, for the social platforms and their extensions. Web 2.0 has given rise to social platforms, which are online shopping services that link customers and let them find, share, recommend, rate, and buy products (Hajli, 2015 ). However, Cluster #3 social platforms (profile score = 0.96) ranked fourth with 52 sizes; the average cited year was 5 years ago. Social platforms, including Facebook, TikTok, blogs, Instagram, and Pinterest, are developing in full swing. Its emergence has also led to different research derivatives: Cluster #0 live-streaming shopping (silhouette score = 0.882, cited mean year is 2020), Cluster #9 social media celebrity (silhouette score = 0.96, cited mean year is 2017), Cluster #2 facebook browsing (silhouette score = 0.959, cited mean year is 2017). In terms of Cluster #0: Live-streaming shopping with the largest cluster size. It is a novel shopping model developed with social platforms. Compared with the traditional online shopping model, live-streaming shopping pays more attention to the interaction between merchants and consumers. Moreover, the effects of the time scarcity characteristic are the icing on the cake of this kind of shopping which provides favorable conditions for stimulating consumers’ impulse purchases (Hao and Huang, 2023 ). Besides, the study of Xu et al. ( 2020 ) examines the impact of contextual and environmental factors, such as the streamer attractiveness on viewers’ cognitive and emotional states and subsequent reactions. From this, it can be seen that the study view of streamers is also an essential research perspective in live-streaming shopping. It is also closely related to another cluster, the #9 social media celebrity. Currently, various studies are exploring the relationship between social media celebrities and impulse purchases in the background of social platforms. According to Chen et al. ( 2021 ), consumers’ recognition of social platform celebrities can increase their trust in marketing activities and thus increase impulse purchases. Similarly, Xiang et al. ( 2016 ) explored the relationship between shoppers’ intimacy with media personalities (parasocial interaction PSI) and impulse buying tendency and found a positive correlation. And for cluster #2 Facebook browsing, it’s a unique variable source from the Facebook social platform. Although it is a niche cluster, it also occupies the third cluster. This shows that the Facebook platform, with a huge population base, performs outstandingly among other social platforms. At present, social platforms are still developing and extending. Most of the research on impulse buying with social platforms comes from China. Future exploration can be done from the perspective of Cross-country comparison, new-style social platforms, and new forms of consumption.

Third, in terms of the product types for impulse buying. Among the top ten clusters, the most prominent is Cluster #4 luxury goods (silhouette score = 0.92, mean the cited year is 2014), and Cluster #8 food waste (silhouette score = 0.956, the mean the cited year is 2010). The cluster #4 luxury goods, which ranked fourth in the forefront of size, with the COVID-19 pandemic and digital transformation, the luxury goods industry has also gradually introduced online models (Hoang et al., 2022 ). The impulse buying behavior of luxury products represents a new group. First, scholars have confirmed that material goods or services represent unique personality traits of materialistic people (Islam et al., 2021 ). Second, it is about the element of trust. Trust has a significant influence on impulse buying (Chen et al., 2021 ). Luxury products have been shown to boost people’s feelings of trust, encouraging them to make impulsive purchases (Chen et al., 2021 ). For cluster #8 food waste, the average year is within 5 years. The relationship between food waste and impulse buying varies greatly from different angles. Lahath et al. ( 2021 ) consider impulsive buying to be a factor in food waste, and their study reveals the mediating role of impulse buying and the moderating role of neuroticism on food waste during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. This kind of food waste caused by anxiety and panic is highly negative.

On the contrary, the results of Liao et al. ( 2022 ) show that impulse buying is one factor that significantly affects food waste reduction intention. The purpose of the differences between these two studies is the main reason for the relationship differences. The former believes that impulse leads to food waste. The latter supposes that discount promotion induces impulsive buying, solving the problem of wasted expired products.

Finally, for the consumer’s impulsive buying factors, Cluster #5 subjective well-being (silhouette score = 0.954, cited mean year is 2011), Cluster #6 brand attachment (silhouette score = 0.952, cited mean year is 2017), and Cluster #9 flow experience (silhouette score = 0.882, cited mean year is 2020) are all subjective factors of impulse buying consumers in Table 4 . For #5 subjective well-being, many researchers have integrated personality traits into subjective well-being and impulse buying behavior. Seinauskiene et al. ( 2016 ) discovered that lower well-being levels enhance materialism, which then fuels a higher level of impulsive purchase tendencies. Besides, the research of (Silvera et al., 2008 ) also integrated Interpersonal variables in related studies. It was proven that, at the cognitive level, impulsive purchasing has a negative correlation with subjective well-being but that, at the emotional level, it has a positive correlation with social influence and emotional sensitivity. Concerning Cluster #6: Brand attachment, many scholars have integrated brand attachment into impulse buying research. According to the study of Japutra et al. ( 2019 ), brand attachment entirely mediates the association between ideal self-congruence. Besides, findings from Japutra et al. ( 2022 ) demonstrate a positive relationship between impulsive and obsessive-compulsive purchasing and the three aspects of brand attachment: passion, prominence, and anxiety. Then, it is about the #9 flow experience cluster closely related to social platforms and online shopping. Bao and Yang ( 2022 ) discovered that consumers’ flow experience, trust, and customer’ serendipity encourage impulse buying.

Author co-citation network

The author co-citation network is represented in Fig. 7 , and 786 authors and 5245 links are linked with collaboration. The relationship between scholars’ co-citations is close. More authors are cited when the font and node are larger. It is essential to note that in this analysis, only an article’s first author will be considered (Fang et al., 2018 ). Lists the top 10 researchers according to citation counts. With 415 citations, ROOK DW was the author who received the most attention, yet his centrality (0.15)—a measure of how impactful a scientific contribution may be—ranked fourth, not first. As a USC Marshall School of Business professor, he offered a novel understanding of its phenomenology when consumer impulse buying was still not fully understood (Rook, 1987 ). Furthermore, the normative features of impulsive buying were also first empirically examined by him as a researcher. In the article of Rook and Fisher ( 1995 ), the authors demonstrated that only when customers feel that acting on impulse is acceptable does the association between the buying impulsiveness trait and related purchase behaviors become meaningful.

The figure depicts the documents’ co-citation network based on impulsive buying behavior research for the year ranging from 1976 to 2023.

As table 5 shows, it is worth noting that although BEATTY SE and KACEN JJ are both in the top five in frequency, their centrality is relatively low in the top ten. Scholar Beatty SE’s citations (276) came in second place. Her position at The University of Alabama is as a professor of marketing. Besides, she put forth a precursor model of impulsive buying and used data extracted at two points in time (during post- and pre-shopping interviews) from a regional shopping mall setting, providing a basis for future research and Management impact (Beatty and Ferrell, 1998 ). KACEN JJ is a Clinical professor at the University of Houston, College of Business Administration. Her research is full of great originality and focuses on the impact of cultural differences on impulse buying. Most of the research was on impulse buying in the United States at that time, but she started doing cross-cultural studies. Her team discovered that the impulse buying scale is suitable for the United States but not for other countries, and then they analyzed the moderating role of culture different from the perspectives of individualism and collectivism. Additionally, they concentrated on cultural differences in consumers’ satisfaction with planned and impulsive purchases, which contribute to this realm (Lee and Kacen, 2008 ; Kacen and Lee, 2002 ).

On the contrary, although the frequency of STERN H and PARBOTEEAH DV is not in the top five, their centrality enters the top two. STERN H is the founder of the impulse buying theory, which provides fresh eyes on consumer purchasing behavior. The article he published in 1962 has been highly cited over 1900, in which he is the first to define impulse buying as divided into four categories: Pure Impulse Buying, Reminder Impulse Buying, Suggestion Impulse Buying, and Planned Impulse Buying (Stern, 1962 ). PARBOTEEAH DV is an Associate Professor at Eastern New Mexico University. She mainly contributes to online impulsive buying behavior. When online impulse buying emerged, she applied environmental psychology theory to expand on prior impulse buying (Parboteeah et al., 2009 ). Through the authors’ co-citation analysis, future researchers can find more research inspiration from related authors’ perspectives.

In summary, scholars read the most influential articles based on their needs to explore impulse purchases. If readers are interested in original empirical research or the precursor model of impulse buying, they can refer to these articles. Moreover, they can read more articles by ROOK DW and BEATTY SE. In addition, KACEN JJ is one of the most influential researchers in this field. She mainly focuses on exploring the differences in cross-cultural research on impulse buying. Thus, readers can learn the information from her studies comparing impulse buying behaviors among different countries. As for readers who want to learn more about the deep classification of impulsive buying behavior, it is recommended to read the articles about impulse buying theory from STERN H. Finally, the articles by PARBOTEEAH DV can provide more inspiration for academics studying environmental psychology and online impulsive buying.

Journal Co-citation network

The journal co-citation network represents the network of journals that contribute to a particular field of research. Figure 8 displays the publications that have contributed the most over the past 21 years about impulsive buying behavior. A journal receives more citations, the more significant the node diameter (Mustafee et al., 2014 ). The top ten most-cited journals out of the 790 that were currently retrieved are displayed in Table 6 . More than 280 frequencies have been cited in conjunction with the top ten journals. With 544 co-citations, the Journal of Consumer Research leads the field, followed by the Journal of Business Research with 463 co-citation frequencies. Most publications of impulsive buying articles concentrate on marketing, psychology, and computer science. This analysis can be a valuable reference for academics looking for a relevant journal to publish their research in this area.

The figure denotes the journals’ co-citation network based on impulsive buying behavior research for the year from 1976 to 2023.

The most prolific journals in the study of impulsive behavior are listed in Table 7 . With 29 articles published between 2001 and 2022, the Journal of Retailing and Consumers Services is the top journal in this area. Frontiers in Psychology (28), Journal of Business Research (17), Sustainability (13), and International Journal of Retail Distribution Management (12) round out the top five most prolific journals. It should be noted that while Table 7 highlights high-impact factors journals that published articles relating to impulsive buying behavior, Table 6 emphasizes the contributing journals with the highest frequency of citations in the impulsive buying behavior field. According to Fang et al. ( 2018 ), it is generally accepted that high-impact factors journals may also have more excellent citation rates.

Emerging trends of impulsive buying behavior

References with the highest number of citations.

Citation bursts are formed when an article acquires a lot of citations in a short period. These bursts can help reveal some of a specific topic’s research dynamics (Fang et al., 2018 ). Albeit impulsive buying behavior is a developing topic, particular articles obtained a lot of citations, as seen in Table 8 . The table ranks the top 26 articles about impulsive buying behavior based on their citation quantity and popular period. The following will analyze this from three perspectives (long history, strength ranking, and potential).

The article of Beatty and Ferrell ( 1998 ) was the first popular citation published about 20 years ago to offer a model of the pre-cursors for impulse buying and empirically evaluate it using information obtained from pre- and post-shopping interviews at two different intervals in time, and its studies served as the basis for later studies on impulsive buying behavior.

Then, we analyze the strengths of the top three articles from the perspective of the top three articles. All the top three articles lasted for four years in burst. To begin with, Xiang et al. ( 2016 ) have the number one Strength Value (14.28), which is also one of the earlier articles based on parasocial interaction with the social platform. The article introduces parasocial interaction theory to examine the influence of social relationship factors on the formation of impulse buying behavior on the Mogujie ( www.mogujie.com ) social platform. The theoretical contribution part combines psychology, marketing, and communication theory and laid the foundation for subsequent researchers to conduct an in-depth exploration of social relationships and purchasing behavior. Following it, the article of Chen et al. ( 2016 ), with the second Strength Value (10.34), uses C2C Facebook as background research and empirically studies the impact of advertising information quality, impulsive traits, and the number of “likes” on advertising. These factors can be combined with the recent past and combined with popular social media wins with novelty. After that, the article of strength (8.93) at position third discusses the impact of social networking website content on users’ emotional reactions. The study expanded on the SOR paradigm’s use in social commerce impulsive buying and clarified the distinction between impulsive buying and buying (Huang, 2016 ). In fact, these three articles have the common keyword “social platform”, consistent with the hot clustering tag words mentioned earlier.

Next, we will introduce some articles with a strength value within the top 20, but with relatively recent publication years. For example, an article by Aragoncillo and Orus ( 2018 ), ranked as having the highest recent burst year, offers the first step in validating a scale that effectively measures the influence of social media on impulse buying behavior. Comparing online and offline channels and obtaining results that indicate increased impulse buying behavior, provides direction for subsequent scholars to explore further comparisons between online and offline impulse buying.

Secondly, another recent article ranked 16 in strength, offers a novel perspective based on pre-purchase tendencies and impulse buying behavior. Furthermore, it proposes a new model encompassing personal characteristics, addressing a current gap in the literature (Bellini et al., 2017 ).

Another newer burst year article is from (Wu et al., 2016 ), which mainly proposes a novel research model to examine impulse buying behavior in a complete manner (starting from the trust belief and technology use with the mediator of flow experience).

Overall, among these three newer burst year articles, two of them start from the impulse buying models, and one compares from the online and offline channels. These mindsets provide scholars with many different ideas for impulse buying extension.

Analysis of keywords

Examining keywords might reveal the direction in which a topic trends. Identifying the research hotspots or the most critical topic in the field also helps to understand future study paths. Figure 9 depicts the time zone of impulsive purchasing behavior. It shows the changing process of keywords. Starting from the period 1996 to 2009, some keywords first appeared a long time ago, but they are still popular at present, such as experience, environment, personality, compulsive buying, motivation, etc. Since 2009, in the rapid development of e-commerce year, the keyword e-commerce has been integrated into the field of impulse buying. Meanwhile, more scholars are exploring online impulse buying further. Besides, many studies are related to high-level consumer demand, such as perceived value, and customer satisfaction. The following content will introduce the keywords regarding their interconnection in a roughly chronological order.

The figure illustrates the time zone view of keywords based on impulsive buying behavior research for the year ranging from 1996 to 2023.

The first part is the keyword “experience”, which appeared in 1996. It emerged at the earliest in this field; however, the frequency will peak in 2021. This keyword has a broad research scope. It is closely related to keywords like “environment”, “flow experience”, “motivation”, “self-control”, etc. According to studies from Selby and Joiner ( 2013 ), arousal brought on by music and perfume increases pleasure levels, which in turn improves approach behavior and shopping satisfaction and explores the moderating effects of store environment on the impulse shopping process. In the same year, Chen and Teng ( 2013 ) discovered a comprehensive model of the effects of online store image on purchase intention in an e-commerce environment and proposed in the future section to explore more specifically which online store features lead to impulse buying behavior. Furthermore, experience is often discussed in conjunction with flow theory as a motivation for impulse buying (Wu et al., 2020 ) considering that pleasant experience and website attributes are both critical driving factors for impulse purchases. Similarly, in the research of Wu et al. ( 2016 ), flow experience was used as a mediating factor driving online shopping. In a word, the flow experience is deeply integrated into online shopping. For self-control, it can suppress emotions, and impulsive consumption is often related to the benefits of hedonic experience. In the desire-willpower model, impulse buying is emphasized as a struggle between desire and willpower (Wang et al., 2020a ; Hofmann et al., 2009 ). In short, self-control and hedonic experience are also antagonistic. Thus, if we explore the relationship between experience and self-control from the perspective of confrontation and combine it with dual-system theory, we will find discoveries. In the future, this part can also do more to innovate impulse purchase models.

Moreover, some studies currently explore personality and materialism together. Then, about another classic word, “personality.” This keyword only appeared three times before 2013 and did not reach its frequency peak until 2018. Currently, most research on personality explores the five-factor personality model and impulse buying. According to Thompson and Prendergast ( 2015 ), the five-factor personality model’s extraversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism measurements unanimously predicted impulse buying. Based on the research of Verplanken and Herabadi ( 2001 ), they found that impulsive buying in the big five model background, the cognitive facet, was inversely associated with conscientiousness, the desire for personal organization, and the shopping need. The affective aspect was associated with action orientation and a lack of autonomy. Otero-López and Villardefrancos ( 2013 ) showed some relationship between the Five-Factor Model personality traits, materialism, and over-purchasing. Authors find extraversion has a positive association with materialism. However, openness and agreeableness have negative relations with materialism, which, in turn, is associated with higher excessive buying propensity. Furthermore, Badgaiyan and Verma ( 2014 ) test the impact of five intrinsic causes on impulsive purchase behavior, including personality, culture, materialism, shopping enjoyment propensity, and impulsive buying tendency. Presently, the part about personality can be explored from different perspectives. There are three categories of personality traits: high-order, low-order, and mid-order. Most of the 5-Factor Model of Personality belongs to high-order. In the future, impulsive buying behavior can be explored with different levels of personality traits. In addition, there is also a blank in the cross-culture exploration of personality, and discoveries will be made comparing the perspectives of individualism and collectivism (Olsen et al., 2016 ).

With the proliferation of e-commerce, the research hotspot trend form of impulse buying gradually changed from offline to online. In a 20-year study on e-commerce, there have been many articles analyzing the factors of online impulse (Kumar et al., 2021 ). The e-commerce keywords in Fig. 9 are shown in 2009, which was also a year of rapid development of e-commerce. The development of e-commerce not only activates the deep needs of consumers but also drives the development of Technology.

As for the consumers’ deep needs, it is divided into value level and interpersonal interaction level. Regarding the consumer value level, perceived value (2022) is first to be mentioned. Perceived value includes different dimensions, such as utilitarian value, emotional value, conditional value, social value, cognitive value, and hedonic value. It is related to Utilitarian and customer satisfaction. From Fig. 9 , the keyword “utilitarian” appeared 6 years earlier than “perceived value” in this field. It can be seen that Utilitarian value is used most frequently as one of the perceived values connected with impulse purchases. At present, people often combine the terms “hedonic” and “utilitarian” together to study impulse buying. According to a study (Zhang et al., 2018 ), consumers who are more impulsive place a higher weight on the hedonic value of internet comments than those who are less impulsive do. Yang et al. ( 2021 ) investigate how, in the context of mobile commerce (m-commerce), customers’ perceived values (utilitarian and hedonic values) influence their impulse buying behavior (IBB). Furthermore, Liu et al. ( 2022 ) discovered that affective impulsive buying is caused by affective information processing while cognitive impulsive buying is dominated by cognitive information processing. Additionally, research has shown that hedonic consumption is dominated by affective information processing while utilitarian consumption is dominated by cognitive. Not only that, “customer satisfaction” is often researched together with perceived value, especially from the perspective of hedonic value. For instance, Madhu et al. ( 2023 ) empirically investigate the intercorrelation between online impulse buying tendencies, online promotions, hedonic motivations, impulse purchase decisions, and customer satisfaction. Besides, Widagdo and Roz ( 2021 ) examine how customers’ satisfaction with online purchasing in Indonesia is influenced by website quality, hedonic shopping motivation, and impulse buying. Generally, if current research can expand beyond the perspectives of utilitarianism and hedonic value, adopt a comparative approach from other dimensions of perceived value, and conduct further studies in this field, there will likely be breakthroughs. At the level of interpersonal interaction, “word of mouth” and “trust” have also been explored together by scholars in this domain. Zhao et al. ( 2020 ) researched from the perspective of word-of-mouth information quality and added consumers’ social psychological distance to study the impact of word-of-mouth on trust. Finally, it was discovered that the relationship between information quality and trust is mediated by social psychological distance. Furthermore, Hidayanto et al. ( 2017 ) examined the factors influencing consumers’ intention to participate in online group buying. Their research found that electronic word-of-mouth significantly affects information search and trust. So far, the research on these two keywords is still in the development stage in this area, and future research is suitable for adding more social psychology theories to support it.

Then, regarding the keyword “technology”, in 2012, it became a popular word related to impulse buying, as Fig. 9 presented. The technology mentioned here consists of three components: first, the continuous change of the website has brought about technology upgrades. Second, technology products, such as apps and virtual reality, are prominent in the new era. Third, research on interdisciplinary new technology combined with Impulse Buying. The following chapters will elaborate on the literature review from these three aspects. The first is about website technology. Based on the research of Wu et al. ( 2016 , the results reveal that two critical factors, technology use, and trust beliefs, are necessary for online impulse buying. Similarly, Kimiagari and Asadi Malafe, ( 2021 ) integrated the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) into the SOR model and looked into the connection between cognitive and affective reactions to internal and external stimuli and impulse buying behavior based on social media. The second is for technological products. Chang and Tseng ( 2014 ) think that modern technological advancements (such as apps) allow e-retailers to provide clients with more practical and user-friendly online locations, giving consumers more choices and increasing their likelihood of impulse purchasing online. Saffari et al. ( 2023 ) took metaverse shopping as the background, then applied the role of emotion and cognition to the dual process, discussed through the electroencephalography method, and the distinction between planned shopping and unplanned shopping is made. Furthermore, the empirical findings of Chen et al. ( 2022 ), which were applied to the virtual reality (VR) environment retail industry, demonstrate that interaction and vitality have a beneficial impact on telepresence, perceived diagnostic, and fun, which incite consumers to make impulsive purchases. The third is about multidisciplinary analysis techniques. Bak et al. ( 2022 ) present data as a potential biomarker for identifying impulse purchase behavior through a brain-computer interface-based method for processing brain signals. Their study explores the hypothesis that duty-free shopping enhances impulsive buying behavior. In summary, there is still significant potential in the intersection of technology and impulse buying, particularly in the context of the latest Internet technology, new-era technology applications combined with the metaverse, and interdisciplinary research methods. Furthermore, existing research on the behavioral mechanisms underlying impulsive buying behavior remains unclear (Liu et al., 2022 ). Therefore, future research could delve deeper into the factors influencing impulse buying from psychological and technical perspectives.

Conclusions

Impulsive buying behavior has received considerable attention in consumer research (lyer et al., 2020 ). With the advance of the times, impulse buying has continuously extended from the business and management field to computer science information systems, psychology multidisciplinary, economics, and hospitality leisure sport tourism. Moreover, the number of publications on impulse buying in 2022 is 2.42 times higher than in 2018, highlighting significant research potential in this field. The current impulsive buying behavior literature review focuses on online impulse buying (Abdelsalam et al., 2020 ; Bashar et al., 2022 ; Chan et al., 2017 ). Besides, a limited number of studies on impulsive buying behavior have employed meta-analysis (lyer et al., 2020 ; Zhao et al., 2022 ).

Nevertheless, current research overlooks a comprehensive exploration of traditional impulse buying from a temporal perspective and lacks a visual analysis perspective. Therefore, more investigations are necessary in this field. This study provides an objective and comprehensive review of this knowledge area by exploring the history and future trends of the impulse buying topic using CiteSpace software. The data, derived from the WoS Core Collection, spans the period from 1967 to September 30, 2023.

Based on our country’s collaboration network, China’s publication volume (including Taiwan) is 1.38 times that of the United States. However, one literature article shows that the number of articles published in China is 2.88 times that of the United States (Bashar et al., 2022 ). The conclusions drawn in this article are approximately twice those of this study.

Likewise, the country distribution pie chart shown in another article (Kathuria and Bakshi, 2024 ) reveals that the number of articles published by China is over twice that of the United States. The difference in the proportion of quantities is because these two articles focus on online impulse buying and the setting year after 2000. Thus, we deduce the following conclusion from the previously mentioned points: Over the past twenty years, China has experienced faster development in online impulse purchase research than the United States.

However, the United States has a longer history of offline impulse buying, which has provided a solid foundation for early research in this area. Furthermore, the population base is an essential factor driving impulse buying research. India and China, the two most populous countries in the world, have seen rapid development in this field. In the author collaboration network, the top-ranked author, Umair Akram, is consistent with the author’s ranking in the online impulse buying literature review research (Bashar et al., 2022 ).

Conversely, most of the top 10 authors in this study are from China. Umair Akram mainly studies impulse buying in China. He classified traditional impulse buying behavior and online impulse buying behavior. Bharadhwaj Sivakumaran mainly studies impulse buying in India. He thinks outside the box and explores impulse buying from the service and store environment perspective. Notably, the authors ranked 4-7 are also from Indian institutions. According to the institution collaboration network, the United States, China, and India are the top three countries. As for cooperation between institutions, two groups of institutions have more connections. One group is the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the Great Lakes School of Management, and the Beijing Institute of Technology. The other group is Florida State University and Kyung Hee University. Other institutions’ relationships are relatively scattered, consistent with the country’s collaboration network’s top three ranks, which include the United States, China, and India, which are also more prominent in terms of authors and institutions involved in impulse-buying research.

Therefore, future scholars should explore the similarities and differences in impulse-buying behavior between China and India due to their similar population sizes. Additionally, comparing the differences in impulse-buying behavior between the United States and these developing countries would also be valuable. Thus, this study recommends stronger international collaboration to establish a more extensive research network in this area.

Next, this study conducted an in-depth analysis based on co-citations from the perspectives of clusters, authors, and journals. First, clusters based on the co-citation articles are special content that distinguishes the current study from other literature reviews in this field. These clusters reflect the times’ changes (e.g., COVID-19), social platforms and their extensions (social platforms, live shopping), and consumer impulse buying factors, such as subjective well-being, brand attachment, and flow experience, which add more cause variables for online impulse buying (Zhao et al., 2022 ). Second, the author co-citation network allows readers to find relevant theories and research foundations from the works of different authors. For instance, STERN H is the founder of impulse buying theory, and he divided impulse buying into four types. KACEN JJ researched how cultural differences affect impulsive purchases. Third, regarding journal co-citations, according to the journals in the research of Bashar et al. ( 2022 ), our research added high-quality journals, such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Psychology & Marketing, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, which recommended to readers. Some of these journals are based on the integration of psychology and marketing disciplines.

Concisely, this research expands the content on the latest social platforms and buying causes factors in this field by summarizing and categorizing ways. Meanwhile, the current study encourages scholars to start from classic theories and provide new research angles for researchers to explore impulse buying behavior deeply. For instance, scholars can apply categorical and comparative thinking, such as classifying impulse buying into four different types or classifying cultures to create more innovation on the background of social platforms in this field.

Finally, regarding the emerging trends of impulsive buying behavior, this paper includes articles with the highest number of citations and trends in keywords over time zones. First, it is about the highest number of citation articles; it not only supplements the latest and high-quality reference articles to the existing review literature research (Bashar et al., 2022 ) but also provides classic articles covering the precursor model of impulse buying (Beatty and Ferrell, 1998 ). The top three articles with the latest literature strength are centered around impulse buying behavior on social platforms. Among the two articles published in the latest outbreak year, one starts from the perspective of trust belief and technology use to create a new model to examine the impulse buying behavior of the whole population (Wu et al., 2016 ). The other article is a comparative study of impulse buying through online and offline channels (Aragoncillo and Orus, 2018 ). Second, the time-zone keyword figure helps researchers understand the latest factors that trigger impulsive buying behavior, related theories, models, and cutting-edge trends. For example, the dual-system theory can examine impulsive purchasing from two angles: promotion and inhibition. Consumer need is the facilitator and self-control is the inhibitory factor. Furthermore, needs can be divided into value level and interpersonal interaction level. On the one hand, value-level needs can be explored in conjunction with the theory of consumption values.

On the other hand, interpersonal interaction level can be combined with social psychology theory and the five-factor model of personality. This is similar to the article about a systematic literature review of impulse buying, which also highlights the Big Five model and flow theory (Redine et al., 2023 ), like our research. However, our article suggests that personality traits can be divided into different levels—lower-order, mid-order, and higher-order traits- for further research. In addition, the emerging part of the future is centered on “technique,” which can start from three levels of direction. In addition, the future emerging part centers on “technique,” which can start from three levels of direction. The first level is the technical upgrade brought about by continuous website changes, which indicates that the variables related to the website should be considered. This point is also partially consistent with the perspective of an article doing a meta-analysis on online impulsive buying (Zhao et al., 2022 ). Readers can glean insights from this article’s examination of website-related variables for expansion. Another level of exploration pertains to technology products such as virtual reality and other technological advancements. Scholars are encouraged to integrate new-era technological products, like the metaverse, with impulse purchases in novel scenarios. Additionally, there’s a call for research on interdisciplinary approaches that combine new technology with impulse buying. For instance, an article by Xiao and Nicholson ( 2013 ) conducts a systematic review of a multidisciplinary cognitive-behavioral framework of impulse buying, synthesizing insights from multiple disciplines to explore the antecedents of impulse buying. However, it’s suggested that researchers incorporate techniques from other disciplines to enhance their exploration of impulse buying.

Moreover, this study enhances readers’ comprehension of the current landscape of impulse buying research. By integrating current literature and keyword trend figures over time zones with theoretical models, the study offers a roadmap for future research directions. Furthermore, it provides effective strategies tailored to the perspectives of market managers, consumers, industry stakeholders, and researchers—covering management policies, impulse control, marketing strategies, and research methodologies. These insights empower market managers and consumers to mitigate impulsive buying tendencies. Consumers can reflect on factors contributing to impulsive purchases and the influence of popular social platforms to avoid excessive buying. For marketing planners, understanding the psychological theories and models behind impulsive consumer behavior can inform strategies to boost sales legally and ethically. Finally, researchers can draw inspiration from this study to explore various perspectives, linking offline impulsive buying behaviors to theoretical foundations and conducting innovative research based on current trends.

Hence, this study significantly contributes to the analysis of impulse buying behavior. By systematically analyzing 704 articles published on WoS, it provides a clear overview of the current research status of impulse buying, presented chronologically from a visual perspective. The research expands beyond the study of online impulse buying, addressing offline impulse buying and filling gaps in existing literature. Specifically, it offers an in-depth analysis and summary of the latest publication trends and country distribution, highlighting impulse buying as a thriving area of research. Additionally, the study elaborates on the most productive authors, institutions, and countries according to collaboration networks, drawing new conclusions through comparative analysis. Through keyword time zone analysis, the study further explores impulse buying behavior by integrating impulse buying factors and theoretical foundations, offering innovative insights across three technical levels.

Limitations and future scope

Although this work uses CiteSpace software to yield a thorough and unbiased analysis of publications on impulsive buying behavior, it cannot replace a total literature review. As a result, this study could provide researchers and academics with a thorough picture of impulsive buying behavior. In addition to bibliometric analysis, future studies may also use content analyses of papers addressing techniques and conceptual issues. Additionally, because this study relies solely on Web of Science data, its descriptive analysis is constrained to the correctness of that database. Consequently, this research shows that impulsive buying behavior is a prospective academic topic that is valuable to explore. Since the research in this field exceeded three digits for the first time in 2021, global research on impulse buying has continued to grow rapidly and develop into multiple disciplines. Currently, the research background on impulse buying mainly focuses on online shopping. Over the next five years, the United States, China, and India will continue to be the top three countries in this subject regarding institutional rankings and publication volume. In the future, many related areas will be related to impulsive buying behavior. Through the clusters by co-citation network, high quantity articles of citation, and time zone view of keywords by this research, the future hotspots will continue to extend in social platforms, live-streaming, luxury goods, and food waste.

Moreover, researchers can combine online experience, consumer value, and psychological theories to think deeply about the mechanism behind impulsive buying behavior. Furthermore, technology and impulse buying still have huge potential, especially in the latest Internet technology themes, metaverse background, and interdisciplinary research methods. Besides, future studies can expand the research scope by adding more keywords, such as technique impulsive buying behavior and tourism impulsive buying behavior. Meanwhile, exploration in this domain can continue across different academic databases.

Data availability

The Web of Science database was used to retrieve the necessary data for this research. Hence, the data may be accessed using the same search query and filters that were used in this study. However, the data can also be made available upon reasonable request to the corresponding author.

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In this collaborative effort, Xiyun Gong, Yee Choy Leong, and Ethan Yi Cao contributed to the conception and design. Xiyun Gong and Lee Shin Yiing articulated the research methods and analyzed the data. Abu Naser Mohammad Saif updated the entire discussion and conclusion sections. Moreover, he reviewed the overall grammatical structure of the paper and made necessary adjustments. All authors drafted and revised the manuscript together and approved its final publication.

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Gong, X., Yee, C.L., Lee, S.Y. et al. Knowledge mapping of impulsive buying behavior research: a visual analysis using CiteSpace. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 967 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03473-9

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Accelerating Visual Anticipation in Sport Through Temporal Occlusion Training: A Meta-Analysis

• Systematic Review
• Open access
• Published: 05 August 2024

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• Sean Müller   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5777-4953 1 ,
• Khaya Morris-Binelli 2 ,
• David Z. Hambrick 3 &
• Brooke N. Macnamara 4  

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The video-based temporal occlusion paradigm has been consistently used in visual anticipation sport research.

This meta-analysis investigated the magnitude to which video-based temporal occlusion training could improve anticipation skill with transfer to representative laboratory and field tasks.

As there are considerably fewer anticipation training than performance studies, the meta-analysis included 12 intervention studies with 25 effect sizes where video simulation and/or field-based tests were used. The Downs and Black checklist adapted for sports science research was used to assess methodological quality of the included studies. Decision time and accuracy of anticipation were the outcome measures because both are relevant to sports skills. The changes in these measures between experimental and control groups from baseline to the transfer test context were used to calculate the magnitude of the training effect.

Findings revealed a significant training effect, including a large meta-analytic effect size, and no difference in training benefit across video and field-based transfer tests. Publication bias analyses were inconclusive, likely due to the small number of available studies.

Conclusions

These findings are evidence that the temporal occlusion paradigm is an effective method to improve visual anticipation skill across representative perceptual and perceptual-motor transfer tests. The theoretical implication based upon the two-stage model of visual anticipation is that temporal occlusion training can improve use of early information for body positioning by the performer, which could in turn lead to improved execution of the skill goal.

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1 Introduction

Visual anticipation is a critical skill required for expert performance in high-speed sports [ 1 ]. It is needed due to the extreme temporal constraints encountered in sports, such as baseball and cricket batting or the return of serve in tennis, where combined choice reaction and movement times exceed the ball travel time to achieve the skill goal [ 2 ]. Visual anticipation is defined as the capability to use contextual information, such as the pitch count and field placings, as well as opponent kinematic information, such as wrist position, in sports such as baseball and cricket batting to predict object flight [ 3 ]. Several studies have reported that experts have superior anticipation skill compared with lesser skilled players on the basis of their capability to use pre-object flight (known as advance cue) information [ 4 ]. Fewer studies have investigated anticipation training, but these studies are crucial to determine whether performance can be accelerated and transferred to different contexts [ 5 ].

The temporal occlusion method has been consistently used to discriminate anticipation capability between expert and lesser-skilled performers, but also to train anticipation skill [ 6 , 7 ]. Typically, in the discrimination approach, sports-specific footage of an opponent such as a pitcher or bowler executing different skill types is filmed, with the footage edited to place a black video frame prior to object flight [ 8 ]. This is done to control the duration of available visual information to advance cues, with the purpose of understanding the timing of visual information required for anticipation. A series of temporal occlusion video clips of different skill types are then assembled into a randomized sequence and displayed on a laptop or a projection screen. Performers, such as baseball or cricket batters, are required to watch the video clips and predict object flight using either a verbal, written, or simulated motor response [ 2 , 8 ]. When temporal occlusion is used for training, a video clip is shown to the performer, and after a prediction is made, feedback is provided through an non-occluded replay of the previously viewed video clip [ 9 ]. Accordingly, the performer is given feedback on each training trial of the object outcome relative to the prediction they made. Therefore, the temporal occlusion method has dual utility for assessment and training of visual anticipation.

Studies that have investigated whether visual anticipation skill can be improved have compared a variety of instructional approaches. Some example studies have reported that video-based point-light displays [ 10 ], video-based temporal occlusion training [ 9 ], or video-based temporal occlusion training under simulated performance anxiety [ 11 ] improves anticipation skill. The critical design feature, however, is that such intervention studies have tightly controlled the duration (or timing) of visual information through the temporal occlusion paradigm (e.g., [ 9 ]). This is crucial to establish whether improvements gained relate to pickup of advance cue information rather than object flight information. Through tight control of visual information, an initial step has been made to demonstrate that anticipation can be improved from baseline assessment to enhanced pickup of advance information in a re-test assessment [ 4 ]. The more important question is whether temporal occlusion training can improve anticipation so that it transfers to a different context(s) to the one experienced during the training phase [ 5 ].

Transfer can be conceptualized as the influence of experience in one context to another context [ 12 ]. Contextual variation can refer to different stimuli, such as opponents presented in a video simulation or field test, as well as an action response required in a field test [ 5 ]. Investigation of whether transfer occurs to a field context of a sport is challenging because several opponents (e.g., baseball pitchers) are required to repeatedly execute skills (e.g., fastball) so that a suitable number of trials are presented to performers (e.g., baseball batter) to ensure valid and reliable performance measures. In addition, due to unpredictable weather conditions and exposure of expensive equipment to weather conditions, there are further limitations to conducting intervention studies in outdoor field settings. Together, these factors can limit the number of test trials that can be implemented, thus compromising use of large participant sample sizes, as well as implementation of field-based tests [ 13 ]. Studies that have included transfer contexts in their design through different opponents or a motor response have reported benefits based upon temporal occlusion training to video- and field-based tests [ 9 , 10 ]. This indicates that video-based temporal occlusion training can improve anticipation beyond the training stimulus and, importantly, to motor action in field settings. However, the magnitude of transfer benefit from temporal occlusion training has not been quantified in the literature.

The relevance of anticipation and its training to high-speed sports skills has been conceptualized in a two-stage model [ 4 ]. In stage one, advance cue information involving game contextual and opponent kinematic information from the opponent can be used by expert performers to position their lower body for object interception. For example, in cricket batting this refers to use of bowler ball release location to judge whether the ball will be full or short and respond with a forward or backward foot movement. In tennis, observation of server kinematics until the point of racquet–ball contact would be used for lower-body positioning to the forehand or backhand side of the court. In stage two, object flight information is used to guide the striking implement to intercept the object. For example, in cricket batting and the return of serve in tennis, this refers to the use of ball flight and bounce information to fine-tune bat and racquet position to intercept the ball, respectively. Because video-based training has been reported to improve anticipation skill, it has the capacity to improve pickup of advance cues in stage one, which will allow more time to be able to position the body for interception in stage two.

The purpose of this meta-analysis was to determine the magnitude of anticipation transfer improvement that has been reported from video-based temporal occlusion training. We focused specifically on studies that included a video and/or field-based transfer test and compared performance change from baseline assessment to the transfer contexts. Comparison was also made as to whether transfer differed between video- and field-based tests. This is crucial for two reasons. First, from a theoretical perspective, meta-analytic evidence of training transfer will provide information as to whether video-based perceptual training contributes to pickup of advance information in perceptual and perceptual-motor tasks. Second, from a practical perspective, quantification of the magnitude of training transfer allows skill acquisition specialists, coaches, and athletes to make better-informed decisions about the impact of temporal occlusion training to accelerate skill acquisition.

This meta-analysis followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines as outlined by Page et al. [ 14 ]. Accordingly, a flowchart is provided that outlines the steps undertaken for the meta-analysis search and screening process (Fig.  1 ). The search included studies that were published until 19 December 2023. The following search terms were used in the Scopus, PsycINFO, SPORTDiscus, and Web of Science databases: Sport* AND anticipation train* AND transfer*(1), Sport* AND visual-perceptual train* AND transfer*(2), Sport* AND perceptual train* AND transfer*(3), Sport* AND temporal occlusion train* AND transfer*(4), Sport* AND perceptual-cognitive skill train* AND transfer*(5), Sport* AND temporal occlusion AND observation train* AND motor training (6), Sport* AND temporal* AND occlusion* AND train* (7), Motor AND temporal* AND occlude* AND train*(8), Sport* AND decision-making AND train* AND transfer*(9). The following search terms were used in Pro-Quest—Dissertations: Sport* AND anticipat* AND occlu* AND train* AND transfer AND expert* AND (la.exact(“ENG”) AND subt.exact(“kinesiology” OR “psychology” OR “cognitive psychology”) (1), Sport* AND percept* AND cognit* AND occlu* AND train* AND transfer AND expert* AND (la.exact(“ENG”) AND subt.exact(“cognitive psychology” OR “psychology” OR “kinesiology”) (2).

Preferred reporting format for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA)

2.1 Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

The inclusion and exclusion criteria for this meta-analysis are reported in the second box in Fig.  1 . In relation to criteria points 5 and 6, video-based temporal occlusion training needed to have been included in the training phase with transfer assessment to different contexts. As mentioned earlier, transfer was conceptualized as contextual variation in terms of: (i) stimuli in the video-based pre- and post-tests compared with the training phase, (ii) opponents faced in the video-based tests compared with the training phase, or (iii) video-based training compared with a field-based perception–action test. For example, in Brenton et al. [ 10 ] temporal occlusion training was delivered through point-light displays of a bowler, whilst the transfer test included video temporal occlusion of a bowler not used in the pre–post-tests or intervention phases. In another example, Gabbett et al. [ 19 ] used video temporal occlusion training that included patterns of soccer match play, whilst the transfer test involved a pre–post-test of field small-sided games. In relation to inclusion criterion 7, “perception-only” refers to a video assessment task where perception is not coupled to action, whilst “perception–action” refers to a field-based assessment task where perception is coupled to action.

Due to the small number of temporal occlusion training studies, and based upon our selection criteria, 12 studies including 25 effect sizes were suitable for inclusion in the meta-analysis reported in this paper. All studies were published papers and from a diverse range of sports including tennis, cricket, badminton, basketball, softball, soccer, rugby league, field-hockey, Australian Rules football, darts, and handball. These sports include skills that can be classified as open (e.g., cricket) or closed (e.g., darts), which require anticipation based upon opponent information or performer execution of movements, respectively, to achieve the skill goal. Participants in the studies that were included in the meta-analysis ( N  = 248) ranged from novices to highly skilled performers, with the latter ( n  = 107) including those who had participated in national or international level competition.

2.3 Effect Size Data Acquisition and Meta-analytic Procedure

Three steps were undertaken to calculate standardized mean effect size (i.e., Cohen’s d ) difference between an intervention and the control group for meta-analysis. First, the experimental groups’ measures (response accuracy and/or time) and tests (video and/or field) were identified for the selected studies (Table  1 ). Second, the pooled standard deviation from the pre-test for the intervention and control groups was calculated. Then, the pre-test-to-post-test mean difference was calculated for the intervention and control groups. Third, Cohen’s d effect size was calculated by subtracting the intervention group pre-post mean difference from the control group pre-post mean difference and dividing by the pre-test pooled standard deviation (see [ 15 ]).

For studies where the necessary mean and standard deviation information were not reported, we contacted the corresponding author for each of the selected studies via email with a request to provide descriptive data (means and standard deviations) for the experimental groups. Several authors either did not reply or were unable to locate the data because the study was more than 10 years old. For those studies where descriptive data were not provided by the authors, GetData Graph Digitizer Software (version 2.26.0.20) was used to manually extract mean and standard deviation/standard error values. These data were used to calculate standardized mean effect sizes.

An overall meta-analytic analysis was conducted examining standardized mean differences between trained and control groups on performance transfer. Performance transfer was operationalized as response accuracy and/or response time. The rationale for combining these two measures was because high-speed sports require both a high degree of accuracy and timing of responses [ 4 ]. The sign of response time effect sizes was changed to reflect the same interpretation as response accuracy effect sizes: positive effect sizes indicated transfer benefit from temporal occlusion training. Data were submitted to a random effects meta-analysis using the Comprehensive Meta-Analysis (Version 2) statistical software (see [ 15 ]). In addition, we tested whether the transfer test type (video versus field) significantly moderated the size of the effect. Publication bias was assessed using Egger’s regression as well as Duval and Tweedie’s trim and fill analysis. An alpha level of 0.05 was set for all analyses.

3.1 Meta-analytic Analysis

We subjected the effect sizes to a random-effects meta-analysis to determine the overall effect of temporal occlusion training transfer and whether the size of the effect depended on the type of transfer test (video versus field). Table 1 outlines details of the studies included in the meta-analysis in relation to skill level of participants, test types, experimental groups compared, and the respective measures analyzed.

We first checked for outliers by examining whether any study’s residual was greater than three standard deviations from the mean within the transfer test type. No outliers were identified. Figure  2 graphs each of the selected studies’ effect sizes and the overall meta-analytic effect size. The overall analysis found a significant large effect for temporal occlusion training transfer ( Q (11), 31.40; p  < 0.001; \(\overline{d }\) = 1.21; 95% confidence interval (CI) [0.83, 1.59]).

Forest plot of field and video tests and overall meta-analysis effect sizes with 95% confidence interval. M1 and M3 refer to video test response accuracy and timing measures, respectively, whilst M2 and M4 refer to field test response accuracy and timing measures, respectively. Positive effect sizes indicate improvement in anticipation relative to the control group

Heterogeneity was moderate ( τ 2  = 0.27; I 2  = 64.97). We investigated whether heterogeneity was explained by the type of transfer test. Effects did not significantly differ between video tests ( \(\overline{d }\) = 1.26; 95% CI [0.80, 1.72]; p  < 0.001) and field tests ( \(\overline{d }\) = 0.85; 95% CI [0.40, 1.30]; p  < 0.001; Q (1), 1.55; p  = 0.211).

Inspection of the effect sizes across studies indicated that the magnitude of improvement was not necessarily due to greater improvements for novice or lower-skilled participants. For example, studies by Alder et al. [ 11 ], Alsharji and Wade [ 22 ], Brenton et al. [ 10 ], Gabbett et al. [ 9 ], and Gabbett et al. [ 19 ] included skilled to highly skilled players in whom the magnitude of improvement in anticipation skill was descriptively large (mean d  = 0.85, 2.12, 1.40, 1.00, and 1.48, respectively).

3.2 Study Quality Assessment

An adapted version of the Downs and Black [ 24 ] scale, which has previously been deemed relevant to sports science research (see [ 25 ]) was used to rate the methodological quality of the studies included in this meta-analysis. The first (S.M.) and second (K.M.B.) authors rated the studies, and any disagreement was resolved through discussion. Study quality ranged between 9 and 11 out of a scale of 14 (Supplementary Table S1 ).

3.3 Sensitivity Analyses

To ensure that observed effects were not unduly influenced by a single study, we conducted leave-one-out analyses. Leave-one-out analyses perform multiple meta-analytic models, each time excluding a single study. This process allows researchers to observe how much each study influences the aggregate results. We conducted these analyses for the overall effect, video transfer tests, for field-based transfer tests, measures of accuracy, and measures of decision speed.

The leave-one-out analyses yielded overall effects from \(\overline{d }\) = 1.01 and 95% CI [0.76, 1.26] to \(\overline{d }\) = 1.29 and 95% CI [0.90, 1.68], all with p  < 0.001. We further examined leave-one-out analyses for only video-based tests ( \(\overline{d }\) = 1.06 and 95% CI [0.72, 1.39] to \(\overline{d }\) = 1.36 and 95% CI [0.91, 1.82], all with p  < 0.001), only field-based tests ( \(\overline{d }\) = 0.73 and 95% CI [0.25, 1.22] to \(\overline{d }\) = 0.98, and 95% CI [0.56, 1.41], all with p  < 0.003), only measures of accuracy ( \(\overline{d }\) = 0.87 and 95% CI [0.47, 1.26] to \(\overline{d }\) = 1.17 and 95% CI [0.65, 1.69], all with p  < 0.001), and only measures of decision speed ( \(\overline{d }\) = 1.50 and 95% CI [0.97, 2.03] to \(\overline{d }\) = 1.75 and 95% CI [1.26, 2.23], all with p  < 0.001). In 44 of the 46 cases, the 95% confidence interval included the overall observed effect with all studies of \(\overline{d }\) = 1.21. In the remaining two cases, both bounds of the 95% confidence interval were larger than 1.21. Taken together, these results suggest that the effect of temporal occlusion training on performance is robust.

3.4 Publication Bias

Multiple publication bias analyses were conducted to determine whether our results were influenced by potential publication bias of available studies. Each type of analysis has strengths and weaknesses, and so multiple analyses should be conducted.

The first type of publication bias analysis we conducted was Egger’s regression intercept [ 26 ]. Egger’s regression intercept quantifies funnel plots to assess whether small studies with lower-than-average effect sizes appear to be under-represented. The Egger’s regression intercept results suggested the presence of publication bias [intercept = 3.58; standard error (SE) = 1.48; p (1 − tailed recommend) = 0.018].

The second type of publication bias analysis we conducted was Duval and Tweedie’s trim and fill analysis [ 27 ]. This analysis quantifies funnel plots to assess how many smaller-than-average effect sizes appear to be missing and imputes a new overall effect size if these studies were not missing. Duval and Tweedie’s trim and fill suggested that no studies with smaller-than-average effects were missing from our analysis.

These inconsistent publication bias analysis results are likely due to the small number of studies available to analyze, which leads to imprecise estimates. On the basis of this variability, we cannot conclude whether publication bias exists in the literature or whether, and to what extent, our results are influenced by its presence.

4 Discussion

The purpose of this meta-analysis was to quantify the magnitude of video-based temporal occlusion training transfer to video and field-based contexts. Understanding whether anticipation can be improved is crucial because it is a vital skill to deal with the high time constraints in several sports and, therefore, for the facilitation of superior performance. Furthermore, knowing whether this crucial skill can be improved to the extent where there is benefit to perception-only (video) and perception–action (field) tasks has important theoretical and practical implications for researchers, practitioners, and athletes. Study design quality assessment indicated that the included studies had good methodological rigor. Further, sensitivity analyses revealed that no single study was unduly influencing the meta-analytic outcomes. Therefore, despite inconclusive publication bias analyses, it was possible to consider the relevance of temporal occlusion training from theoretical and applied perspectives.

The overall large effect size from video-based temporal occlusion training suggests that substantial improvements in anticipation skill are possible. To contextualize this training benefit, it is important to consider that our sample of selected studies included participants that ranged from novices (e.g. [ 21 ] to highly skilled athletes (e.g. [ 19 ]). The skilled athletes included those who had participated at national and international levels or those who were part of an elite squad (e.g., [ 10 , 19 ], respectively). Therefore, our results not only are driven by a greater magnitude of improvement in lower-skilled performers but also suggest that highly skilled athletes can benefit from this type of training.

The magnitude of video-based temporal occlusion training improvement did not differ between video (perception) and field (perception–action) transfer contexts. This is an important finding because it suggests that video-based perceptual training similarly benefits perception- and perception–action-based tasks. The reasons for this are twofold. First, from a behavioral perspective, all the studies in our meta-analysis included representative visual-perceptual information of an opponent such as what a performer sees in the real world [ 28 ]. Accordingly, the benefits of the video-based temporal occlusion training mapped across perceptual and action responses is likely due to representative visual-perceptual information design [ 29 ]. It is relevant to consider here that none of the studies included contextual information. Despite previous studies that have reported contextual information can be utilized to enhance anticipation (e.g., [ 37 ]), recent research has reported that overreliance on such information can impede the use of kinematic information for anticipation (e.g., [ 38 ]). Second, from a neurophysiological perspective, evidence indicates that sensorimotor regions of the brain are engaged both in perceptual and perceptual-motor anticipation tasks [ 30 ]. As a result, representative video-based perceptual training should engage sensory and motor regions in the brain that will map across perceptual and motor tasks. This is in contrast to literature that argues that visual perceptual information must be coupled with a sport-specific motor response for meaningful skill improvement to occur (e.g., [ 31 ]).

The findings of this meta-analysis have important implications for the two-stage model of anticipation by Morris-Binelli and Müller [ 4 ]. First, it is possible to improve pickup of advance cues in stage one, which is used for body positioning. This is critical because inability to integrate contextual and kinematic cues can cause a delay or reduced accuracy in motor responses such as foot movements in cricket, baseball, and softball batting, or stepping in the return of serve in tennis [ 32 , 33 ]. These errors can cascade into stage two of the model to cause timing or error in positioning the implement such as a bat, racquet, hand, or foot to intercept an object [ 32 , 33 ]. Therefore, video-based temporal occlusion training can guide attention to the pickup of advance information, which may better enable integration with object flight information to achieve skill goal.

Second, the future research directions section of the original two-stage model paper on anticipation [ 34 ] outlined a need for further studies to demonstrate whether anticipation skill can be improved. Since the original two-stage model paper was published, five temporal occlusion training studies have been conducted on the basis of our selection criteria, with the magnitude of the anticipation improvement in their, and some other, studies captured in this meta-analysis. Underpinned by tightly controlled stimulus presentation of temporal occlusion, it appears a variety of instructional methods such as point-light displays [ 10 ], two-dimensional video [ 19 ], above real time video [ 23 ], and anxiety-based perceptual training [ 11 ] may improve anticipation, particularly in stage one. The benefits of improved anticipation in relation to the model present several practical implications.

Video-based temporal occlusion training is not an expensive method and can be easily incorporated into transportable software applications or virtual reality headsets [ 35 ]. For example, software can be used to edit footage of sports performers, such as baseball and softball pitchers as well as tennis servers. Thereafter, the temporal occlusion training technique can be applied. Varying degrees of contextual information, opponent kinematics, and action type challenges can be designed, where training can be done in a quiet room at a sports facility, whilst travelling for competition, or at home (e.g., [ 19 ]). Incorporation of temporal occlusion training with routine practice can also provide a means to overcome limitations to securing opponents to practice against, as well as minimize physical loading during actual practice that can increase risk of injury across a variety of sports [ 36 ]. This presents flexible options for coaches and sports medicine support staff to train anticipation. For the practical and technical implications of temporal occlusion training, see the audio-visual recording in the Electronic Supplementary Material 2 .

5 Conclusion

This meta-analysis results suggest that video-based temporal occlusion training can provide considerable improvement to anticipation skill in sport. Benefits to performance were limited not only to video-based tasks that are much easier to administer but also to field-based tasks that are much more challenging to implement and are closer to the competition setting. This provides justification for the use of temporal occlusion training to improve anticipation across the skill continuum in sport. A potential limitation of this meta-analysis is that there were only 12 studies. It needs to be considered, however, that we used strict selection criteria and training studies that include longitudinal designs that are challenging to implement, and therefore, fewer exist. With a larger pool of studies, a future meta-analysis may be able to include a variety of moderator variables such as length of training and participant skill level in addition to transfer test type. Additionally, future research should compare the magnitude of learning transfer from temporal occlusion training across point-light display, two-dimensional video, above real time video, and anxiety-based manipulations. This will provide guidance on how these manipulations can be incorporated with temporal occlusion training to facilitate transfer to the field setting. Nonetheless, this meta-analysis has reported that, by examining studies that tightly controlled the duration of visual information through the temporal occlusion method, valuable improvements may be made to the critical skill of visual anticipation.

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Müller, S., Morris-Binelli, K., Hambrick, D.Z. et al. Accelerating Visual Anticipation in Sport Through Temporal Occlusion Training: A Meta-Analysis. Sports Med (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-024-02073-6

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SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article

Status and trends of tms research in depressive disorder: a bibliometric and visual analysis.

• 1 Department of Psychiatry, First Hospital of Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan, China
• 2 First Clinical Medical College, Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan, China
• 3 Academy of Medical Sciences, Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan, China
• 4 Department of Neurosurgery, First Hospital of Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan, China

Background: Depression is a chronic psychiatric condition that places significant burdens on individuals, families, and societies. The rapid evolution of non-invasive brain stimulation techniques has facilitated the extensive clinical use of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) for depression treatment. In light of the substantial recent increase in related research, this study aims to employ bibliometric methods to systematically review the global research status and trends of TMS in depression, providing a reference and guiding future studies in this field.

Methods: We retrieved literature on TMS and depression published between 1999 and 2023 from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) databases within the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC). Bibliometric analysis was performed using VOSviewer and CiteSpace software to analyze data on countries, institutions, authors, journals, keywords, citations, and to generate visual maps.

Results: A total of 5,046 publications were extracted covering the period from 1999 to 2023 in the field of TMS and depression. The publication output exhibited an overall exponential growth trend. These articles were published across 804 different journals, BRAIN STIMULATION is the platform that receives the most articles in this area. The literature involved contributions from over 16,000 authors affiliated with 4,573 institutions across 77 countries. The United States contributed the largest number of publications, with the University of Toronto and Daskalakis ZJ leading as the most prolific institution and author, respectively. Keywords such as “Default Mode Network,” “Functional Connectivity,” and “Theta Burst” have recently garnered significant attention. Research in this field primarily focuses on TMS stimulation patterns, their therapeutic efficacy and safety, brain region and network mechanisms under combined brain imaging technologies, and the modulation effects of TMS on brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and neurotransmitter levels.

Conclusion: In recent years, TMS therapy has demonstrated extensive potential applications and significant implications for the treatment of depression. Research in the field of TMS for depression has achieved notable progress. Particularly, the development of novel TMS stimulation patterns and the integration of TMS therapy with multimodal techniques and machine learning algorithms for precision treatment and investigation of brain network mechanisms have emerged as current research hotspots.

1 Introduction

Depressive disorder is characterized primarily by persistent low mood and cognitive dysfunction. According to a 2019 report by WHO, the global prevalence of depressive disorder is 4.4%. This condition not only affects individuals’ mental health but also significantly interferes with their daily activities and social functioning, imposing substantial burdens on individuals, families, and nations ( 1 , 2 ). Current treatments for depressive disorder primarily include pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy, although their overall efficacy remains limited ( 3 ). With the rapid advancement of non-invasive brain stimulation technologies, TMS has emerged as a promising approach in the field of mental health due to its safety, non-invasiveness, minimal side effects, and ease of use. TMS is an FDA-approved safe and effective non-invasive brain stimulation therapy ( 4 ). Initially developed as a non-invasive diagnostic tool to assess neural propagation from the primary motor cortex along the cortical spinal tract, spinal roots, and peripheral nerves ( 5 ), it has progressively been applied to treat psychiatric disorders, particularly depressive disorder. Extensive research indicates that TMS demonstrates superior antidepressant effects compared to sham stimulation in emotional symptoms ( 6 ), cognitive function ( 7 ), suicidal ideation ( 8 ), and other aspects ( 9 ).

However, with the rapid growth of TMS research, systematically reviewing and evaluating existing research outcomes to identify research hotspots, gaps, and future trends has become crucial for advancing scientific progress in this field. Bibliometric analysis, integrating quantitative analysis of extensive literature data with visualization techniques, can intuitively depict research dynamics, collaboration networks, knowledge maps, and thereby reveal the developmental context and innovative trends within a research domain ( 10 , 11 ). In the field of depression, some studies have utilized bibliometric techniques, focusing primarily on comorbidities of depression and intervention methods ( 12 – 14 ). Some scholars have also conducted bibliometric analyses on TMS-related research, but these studies tend to concentrate more on other diseases, such as pain, stroke, and Parkinson’s disease ( 15 – 17 ). Therefore, there remains a gap in bibliometric research concerning TMS and depression. This study aims to comprehensively review and deeply analyze recent research outcomes of TMS in the domain of depression, using bibliometric and visualization analysis methods. It systematically reviews the current status of TMS in the treatment of depression, with the objective of guiding future research directions and promoting the scientific application and innovative development of TMS technology in antidepressant therapy.

2.1 Data sources

Web of Science (WoS) is among the most widely utilized databases for bibliometric analyses. For this study, the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) were chosen from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) as the databases for the search. The search strategy combined the following terms: TS = (“depression*” OR “depressive disorder*” OR “depressive symptom*” OR “depressive neuroses” OR “depressive syndrome” OR “melancholia”) AND TS = (“Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation*” OR “Theta burst stimulation” OR TMS OR rTMS OR iTBS OR aTMS OR cTBS). The time span for the search was set from January 1, 1999, through December 31, 2023. The search was limited to documents in English and included Article and Review as document types. Following the screening process, a total of 5,046 relevant records were identified, from which data such as publication counts, country affiliations, institutions, authors, journals, keywords, and citation information were extracted. The workflow for data collection is illustrated in Figure 1 .

Figure 1 Data retrieval and analysis process. * denotes a truncation character.

2.2 Research tool

VOSviewer is a visualization software tool introduced in 2009 by Van Eck and Waltman of Leiden University in the Netherlands. It employs a distance-based visualization methodology ( 18 ). In our analysis, VOSviewer (V1.6.19) was employed to examine collaboration networks involving countries, institutions, and authors, along with the keyword density. The specific parameters configured in VOSviewer were as follows: counting method (Full Counting), minimum number of publications for institutions (25), minimum number of publications for authors (20), and minimum frequency of keywords (20).

CiteSpace was created in 2004 by Dr. Chaomei Chen and his team at Drexel University in Philadelphia, USA, using a time and graph-based visualization method ( 19 ). We used CiteSpace (V.6.3.R1) to conduct keyword clustering analysis and burst detection. The parameter settings for the CiteSpace software are as follows: time slicing (1 year), K=25, network pruning method (Pathfinder), and the LLR clustering algorithm was used for keyword clustering.

3.1 Annual number of publications

A total of 5,046 records were retrieved from the WOSCC database, comprising 3,880 (77%) articles and 1,166 (23%) reviews. Figure 2 illustrates the annual publication volume and trend associated with TMS and depressive disorders from 1999 through 2023. The publication count escalated from 57 in 1999 to 428 in 2023, demonstrating an overall exponential growth pattern (R² = 0.9759). It is predicted that the research literature in this field will continue to increase in the future.

Figure 2 Number of annual publications from 1999 to 2023.

3.2 Countries and institutions

According to statistical data, a total of 77 countries have contributed to the publication of relevant articles, with the top ten countries based on article quantity detailed in Table 1 . The United States leads in the volume of publications (N=1,750), trailed by China (N=665) and Germany (N=582). Figures 3A and B visually represent the worldwide geographic dispersion and collaborative patterns of publications in this discipline. A prominent observation is the concentration of articles originating from regions across North America, South America, Europe, East Asia, and Oceania. The breadth of the connecting lines symbolizes the intensity of collaborative efforts, highlighting the United States’ notably extensive collaboration with other regions, especially with Canada, Italy, and Germany. Additionally, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, China, Italy, and France exhibit a centrality exceeding 0.1, underscoring their pivotal roles and significant impact within this research domain.

Table 1 Top 10 countries/regions and institutions.

Figure 3 National and institutional collaboration map. (A) Geography map of national cooperative. (B) Country cooperation relationship map. (C) Cluster-based institutional collaboration map. (D) Time-based institutional collaboration map.

A total of 4,573 institutions have published articles in this field, with the top ten contributing institutions listed in Table 1 . The University of Toronto emerges as the most prolific and influential institution in the domain, having published a total of 311 articles. Trailing closely are Harvard Medical School (N=149) and the Medical University of South Carolina (N=143). Figure 3C illustrates the collaborative network among institutions with ≥25 published articles, where nodes of the same color indicate closer connections, resulting in the formation of five collaborative clusters centered around the University of Toronto, Harvard Medical School, the Medical University of South Carolina, Monash University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Figure 3D depicts the temporal dynamics of institutional publications, revealing that both Harvard University and the Medical University of South Carolina initiated research in this area at an earlier stage, whereas Harvard Medical School has emerged as a dominant force in recent years.

3.3 Authors

Approximately 16,000 authors have contributed to the publication landscape in this field. Table 2 enumerates the top ten authors based on both their publication counts and citation impact. Daskalakis ZJ leads in terms of the number of articles published, with a total of 194 papers, followed by Fitzgerald PB (N=141) and Blumberger DM (N=122). In terms of citation frequency, the author with the highest cumulative citations is Pascual-Leone A (12,677 citations), succeeded by Daskalakis ZJ (10,993 citations) and Fitzgerald PB (9,455 citations). Figure 4 depicts the collaborative network among authors who have published 20 or more articles, revealing the existence of nine distinct clusters within this intricate web of collaborations.

Table 2 Top 10 authors and cited authors.

Figure 4 Author collaboration network map.

3.4 Journals

The 5,046 articles retrieved were published across 804 different journals, with the top 10 journals by publication volume detailed in Table 3 . According to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) classification, half of these top 10 journals are situated in the Q1. Leading amongst them is BRAIN STIMULATION , which boasts the highest publication count at 214 articles, accompanied by an Impact Factor of 7.7 and is categorized within the Q1 by JCR. Following closely are JOURNAL OF AFFECTIVE DISORDERS (N=191, IF=6.6), CLINICAL NEUROPHYSIOLOGY (N=119, IF=3.7), and FRONTIERS IN PSYCHIATRY (N=96, IF=3.2) in terms of publication frequency, also reflecting their respective Impact Factors.

Table 3 Top 10 journals.

3.5 Citation analysis

Table 4 enumerates the top 10 most co-cited references among all the downloaded literature. Topping the list is an article published in 2018 by Blumberger DM et al. ( 20 ) in THE LANCET , which accumulated the highest co-citation count (347). This study compares the clinical effectiveness, safety, and tolerability of intermittent Theta-Burst Stimulation (iTBS) versus standard 10 Hz repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) in adults with treatment-resistant depression (TRD). Ranking second and third in co-citation frequency are the clinical guidelines for the application of rTMS, authored by Lefaucheur JP and colleagues ( 21 , 22 ).

Table 4 Top 10 references.

3.6 Keyword analysis

By clustering and density analyzing high-frequency keywords using software algorithms, representative clusters are presented (as shown in Figures 5A, B ). The application of TMS in the treatment of depressive disorders is reflected in Cluster 2 (Mood Disorder, including depressive disorder, bipolar depressive disorder, dysthymic disorder, etc.), Cluster 9 (Major depression), and Cluster 12 (TRD). As the most common non-invasive physical treatment method, the antidepressant efficacy and stimulation modes of TMS are demonstrated in Cluster 3 (rTMS), Cluster 6 (Non-invasive Brain Stimulation), and Cluster 4 (Theta Burst Stimulation). In terms of micro-level neurobiochemical regulation and macro-level brain region circuitry mechanisms, Cluster 7 (Synaptic Plasticity), Cluster 13 (Neurotrophins), Cluster 8 (Anterior Cingulate), and Cluster 10 (Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex) are representative. Cluster 5 (Cortical Excitability) and Cluster 11 (Intracortical Inhibition) can show the excitatory and inhibitory effects of TMS on the brain. Additionally, Cluster 1 (Functional Connectivity) and Cluster 15 (Evoked Potentials) represent the most commonly used brain detection methods for exploring the antidepressant mechanisms of TMS.

Figure 5 Keyword density map, clustering map, and burst map. (A) Keyword density map. (B) Clustering map. (C) Burst map.

Figure 5C illustrates the top 25 most cited keywords from 1999 to 2023. The analysis of keyword bursts reflects shifts and trends in the focal points of the research domain, with red segments marking the time of each keyword’s emergence. Keywords that experienced bursts earlier on include “Mood,” “Response,” and “Facilitation,” indicating that initial TMS studies primarily investigated its effects on mood, symptom alleviation, and neural activity in individuals with depressive disorders. As research progressed, terms such as “Controlled Trial,” “Paired Associative Stimulation,” and “Cortical Plasticity” gained prominence, highlighting an evolving interest in the efficacy, safety, and underlying antidepressant mechanisms of TMS among researchers. In recent years, the emergence of keywords like “Default Mode Network,” “Functional Connectivity,” and “Theta Burst” signals the advent of new research hotspots, pointing to the continuous refinement of neuroimaging evaluation metrics and the exploration of novel stimulation paradigms.

We standardized the keywords of the articles and categorized the stimulation patterns of TMS, BDNF, neurotransmitters, brain regions, and combined detection technologies in a standardized manner (as shown in Figure 6 ). Figure 6A indicates that the most commonly used stimulation pattern for TMS is repetitive rTMS, followed by intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS). Figure 6B reveals that among the micro-molecular studies of TMS in depression, BDNF is the most frequently explored, followed by gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and glutamate. Figure 6C shows that in the research on the stimulation targets and brain regions of TMS in depression, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is the most studied, followed by the hippocampus and cerebellum. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) have also been extensively investigated. From Figure 6D , we can observe that the research on the mechanism of TMS efficacy is mostly based on Electroencephalogram (EEG) and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) technologies.

Figure 6 Keyword composition diagram. (A) Stimulus pattern. (B) Molecular mechanism. (C) Brain area. (D) Combined techniques.

4 Discussion

What is the current global research landscape concerning TMS for treating depression? What significant achievements and research trends have emerged in the treatment and mechanistic study of depression? Our visual analysis and systematic review offer a comprehensive overview of the current research status in this field.

4.1 The global research trends of transcranial magnetic stimulation in the field of depression disorders

From 1999 to 2023, there has been a sustained increase in research on TMS and depressive disorder, reflecting rapid advancements in both scientific research and clinical applications in this field. Among the numerous journals publishing research outcomes related to TMS and depression, BRAIN STIMULATION , a leading international authority in the neurostimulation domain, has distinguished itself through its exceptional academic publishing standards and widespread scholarly influence. It has disseminated numerous high-quality research papers, establishing itself as the most prolific journal in this field in terms of publications.

This study encompasses 4,573 institutions across 77 countries, illustrating global attention and participation in TMS research for depression, particularly concentrated in North America, Europe, East Asia, and Oceania. The United States leads significantly with 1,750 publications, showcasing its robust strength and extensive expertise in TMS and depression research. This leadership is evident not only in quantity but also in extensive international collaborations, notably with Canada, Italy, and Germany. China follows with 665 publications, reflecting its rapid emergence and strong potential in this field, supported by increased research investment and improved scientific environments, positioning China as a significant future force. Prominent institutions such as the University of Toronto, followed closely by Harvard Medical School and the Medical University of South Carolina, play pivotal roles as influential hubs in this field. These institutions not only demonstrate high productivity but also lead in network collaboration and research direction. Early contributions from Harvard University and the Medical University of South Carolina have laid foundational groundwork, while recent advancements from Harvard Medical School underscore ongoing and dynamic developments in this field. Notably, 8 of the top 10 ranked institutions are globally renowned universities, reflecting dominance in research driven by high-caliber platforms and talent. Furthermore, half of these top-ranked institutions originate from the United States, reaffirming its leadership and pivotal role facilitated by substantial research investments, advanced facilities, and a concentration of top academic institutions. Among over 16,000 authors, figures like Daskalakis ZJ, Fitzgerald PB, and Pascual-Leone A not only publish prolifically but also wield substantial academic influence, through close collaboration with other authors, they have gradually formed their own circles of cooperation. The identification of 9 clusters likely represents distinct research teams, indicating a trend towards enhanced collaboration and expanded cooperative networks over time. In summary, with ongoing technological advancements and deepened research endeavors, TMS holds promising prospects for depression treatment. Future expectations include the emergence of higher-quality research outcomes and broader international and interdisciplinary collaborations.

4.2 The status and hotspots of transcranial magnetic stimulation in the field of depression disorders

4.2.1 tms stimulation modes, efficacy, and safety.

TMS is a non-invasive neuro-modulation technique categorized into three main modes based on pulse stimulation: single-pulse TMS (sTMS), paired-pulse TMS (ppTMS), and rTMS. Initially employed in studying brain function and assessing neurological disorders, TMS has evolved into a crucial therapeutic tool in psychiatric illnesses. ppTMS involves delivering two stimuli to the same target area using a single coil or stimulating different regions with two coils, commonly utilized to investigate neural facilitation and inhibition mechanisms. Jeng et al. observed significant reductions in short-interval intracortical inhibition (SICI) and long-interval intracortical inhibition (LICI) in TRD patients using ppTMS ( 30 ). When the paired stimuli in ppTMS target different cortical and peripheral neural regions respectively, this mode is known as Paired Associative Stimulation (PAS). Noda et al. demonstrated impaired neuroplasticity in the DLPFC of depressive patients using the DLPFC-PAS paradigm, characterized by reduced power in gamma (γ), theta (θ), and delta (δ) frequency bands, and diminished phase-amplitude coupling (θ-γ coupling) ( 31 ).

rTMS is widely approved as a first-line treatment for depressive disorder and represents the most utilized modality for this condition ( Figure 6A ). By delivering either continuous or intermittent stimulation to specific brain regions, rTMS induces lasting neuroregulatory effects. The predominant stimulation protocols for treating depression involve high-frequency stimulation (HF) to the left-DLPFC(L-DLPFC) and low-frequency stimulation (LF) to the right-DLPFC(R-DLPFC) ( 26 ). HF-rTMS, defined as stimulation exceeding 1 Hz, exerts excitatory effects on cortical activity. Meta-analyses indicate that optimal antidepressant effects are achieved when HF-rTMS sessions deliver a total pulse count between 1200 and 1500 pulses per day ( 9 ). LF-rTMS, characterized by stimulation at 1 Hz or less, conversely inhibits cortical activity. A multicenter randomized double-blind controlled trial has demonstrated that continuous 1 Hz LF-rTMS administered over 2-6 weeks produces significant therapeutic benefits in TRD, with a response rate of 41% ( 32 ).

With the advancement of TMS technology, several new stimulation modes have emerged such as Theta Burst Stimulation (TBS), accelerated rTMS (arTMS), and deep rTMS (drTMS). TBS, by mimicking the endogenous theta rhythm of the hippocampus in pulse release frequency ( 33 ), significantly induces synaptic long-term potentiation. Among these, iTBS has received FDA approval for treating treatment-resistant depression, offering advantages of shorter stimulation time and stronger induction of neuroplasticity compared to conventional rTMS. Derivative modes such as accelerated iTBS (aiTBS) and prolonged iTBS (piTBS) are increasingly recognized in clinical studies for depression treatment ( 34 ). A randomized controlled trial from Canada initially compared iTBS with 10 Hz rTMS, demonstrating comparable efficacy in reducing depressive symptoms, with response and remission rates of 49% and 32%, respectively, for the 3-minute iTBS protocol versus the standard 37.5-minute 10 Hz rTMS protocol ( 20 ). Kishi et al. reviewed six randomized controlled trials supporting similar findings and suggesting that iTBS, with its shorter stimulation time and lower intensity, may be more suitable in clinical applications than HF-rTMS ( 35 ). In contrast, continuous TBS (cTBS) reduces neuronal excitability, and a combined approach of cTBS over the right DLPFC with iTBS over the left DLPFC demonstrates effective antidepressant effects ( 22 ). arTMS, characterized by shorter duration and higher frequency of stimulation, proves faster and more effective in improving major depressive episode compared to standard rTMS protocols ( 36 ). Utilizing an H-coil system, drTMS allows stimulation of deeper brain regions. Levkovitz et al. demonstrated the efficacy and safety of 18 Hz drTMS in 212 major depressive disorder (MDD) patients resistant to antidepressant medication, maintaining therapeutic effects for up to 16 weeks ( 37 ).

In recent years, the efficacy and safety of TMS in MDD have been extensively researched. A meta-analysis involving 2,982 depressed patients demonstrated significant improvement in depressive symptoms following rTMS treatment compared to sham stimulation (Hedges’g = -0.791), with more than twice the likelihood of response or remission in the rTMS group ( 38 ). Li et al. demonstrated the efficacy of various TMS protocols for treating TRD and TBS to potentially be the most effective mode ( 39 ). Qiu et al.’s study validated the effectiveness of TMS in treating adolescent depression, showing comparable response rates between adolescents (33%-56%) and adults (29%-60%), and even higher remission rates in adolescents (13%-44%) compared to adults (18%-22%) ( 40 ). Similarly, rTMS effectively alleviates depressive symptoms in elderly patients, with treatment outcomes improving with advancing age ( 41 ). Wang et al. also confirmed the safety and tolerability of TMS for MDD treatment, noting minor and transient adverse effects such as discomfort and pain at the stimulation site ( 42 ).

4.2.2 Brain region mechanisms based on combined techniques

The application and advancement of brain imaging techniques in conjunction with TMS, such as EEG and fMRI, have become prominent. These techniques assist in neuro-navigation for targeting stimulation areas, exploring underlying psychophysiological mechanisms, and predicting individualized therapeutic efficacy. EEG, with its high temporal resolution, is a common tool in TMS research. In recent years, the maturity of TMS-EEG technology has enabled simultaneous stimulation of brain tissues and real-time acquisition of electroencephalographic signals, facilitating immediate monitoring of stimulation effects. Furthermore, fMRI, renowned for its exceptional spatial resolution, reveals subtle changes in brain functional connectivity under depressive disorders, offering valuable insights into the neurobiological basis of depression ( 43 , 44 ).

In numerous TMS studies, the DLPFC has held a pivotal position as a core target for treating depressive disorders ( Figure 6C ). Researchers associate the DLPFC primarily with functions related to emotion regulation, reward processing, cognition, and decision-making assessment, all of which are impaired in depressive disorders, closely linking its diagnosis and treatment ( 45 ). Situated in the superficial cortex of the brain, the DLPFC can be directly stimulated via TMS pulses through the skull, underscoring why it has long been considered a classical stimulation target ( 46 ). However, as research advances, scientists are increasingly exploring other brain regions such as the hippocampus, cerebellum, ACC, amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), all of which play complex and crucial roles in the neurophysiological mechanisms of depression.

With the rise of MRI-based studies on brain connectivity and the introduction of brain network concepts, it is increasingly acknowledged that TMS stimulation effects can propagate to distant brain regions through network effects, potentially modulating entire basal brain networks. Many scholars attribute the therapeutic efficacy of rTMS in treating depression largely to stimulation effects spreading through functional connections from the stimulated area to deeper brain structures ( 47 ). The hippocampus is recognized as a crucial brain region involved in learning, memory, and co-regulation of perception and emotion with other brain areas ( 48 ). Structural and functional abnormalities in the hippocampus are closely linked to psychiatric disorders, particularly MDD ( 49 , 50 ). A study analyzing TMS-EEG data in MDD patients before and after rTMS treatment found that the orbitofrontal-hippocampal pathway plays a pivotal role in mediating depression relief post rTMS therapy, suggesting potential alternative targets for brain stimulation therapies targeting depression ( 51 ).

Traditionally regarded as part of the motor circuitry, the cerebellum’s role in cognitive functions is increasingly recognized. Cerebellar outputs can project directly to the cerebral cortex, modulating excitability through tightly integrated neural circuits with the neocortex. Meta-analyses based on neuroimaging studies indicate that, apart from the frontal lobes, both structural and functional alterations in the cerebellum and brainstem are implicated in the pathophysiology of TRD ( 52 ). Recent research suggests that the cerebellum could serve as an alternative target for rTMS therapy in depression patients. Concurrent stimulation of the prefrontal cortex and cerebellum may potentially enhance symptom improvement more effectively in these patients, with ongoing efforts aimed at experimental validation. A PET study revealed that TRD patients who exhibited better clinical outcomes and responded to left DLPFC HF-rTMS treatment showed higher baseline cerebellar metabolic activity ( 53 ).

Research indicates that the ACC is implicated in emotion regulation and modulates reward and non-reward mechanisms in depression ( 54 ). The rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), a critical component of the ACC located anterior to the corpus callosum, serves as a hub within the default mode network ( 55 ). In a multicenter randomized clinical trial, increased theta activity in the rACC predicted improvement in depressive symptoms among MDD patients, suggesting it as a nonspecific prognostic biomarker for treatment outcomes ( 56 ). The sgACC, another integral part of the ACC, is closely associated with depression, particularly in the regulation of sadness ( 57 ). Previous studies have shown that better outcomes are associated with transference of stimulation pulses from the DLPFC to regions negatively connected with the sgACC ( 29 , 58 ). Ge et al.’s rTMS-fMRI study on TRD indicated that functional connectivity levels between sgACC and rACC may serve as potential predictors of rTMS treatment response, demonstrating robustness in longitudinal follow-ups up to three months ( 59 ). Additionally, Baeken et al. used PET imaging to explore metabolic changes in the sgACC post-treatment, observing decreased local glucose metabolism in TRD patients following transcranial magnetic stimulation ( 60 ). Abnormal functional connectivity among subregions of the anterior cingulate cortex appears to be crucial in depression circuits and mechanisms underlying rTMS treatment effects, warranting further investigation in ACC-focused research.

The amygdala is a crucial component of reward and salience networks and a key site implicated in chronic stress-induced alterations in patients with depressive disorders ( 61 ). Eshel et al., using rTMS-fMRI with the L-DLPF as a stimulation target, demonstrated increased global connectivity in patients receiving active stimulation. This intervention induced restoration of inhibitory connectivity between L-DLPFC and the amygdala, changes in which could predict clinical outcomes ( 62 ). Besides the aforementioned brain regions, various subregions of the frontal cortex Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex (DMPFC), Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex (VMPFC), as well as the parietal cortex, auditory cortex, and visual cortex, have garnered increasing attention from researchers. Several of these areas are considered as potential alternative stimulation targets to DLPFC.

The exploration of TMS-induced metabolic, functional, and structural changes in different brain regions among patients with depression has become a recent focus of research. With the rising adoption of multimodal integration technologies, particularly multi-channel and multimodal approaches, robust tools have emerged for real-time monitoring of dynamic brain changes under TMS intervention. These advancements not only facilitate precise spatial localization for targeted TMS therapies but also enable exploration of the macroscopic mechanisms of temporal and spatial information across different brain regions. However, these macroscopic changes in brain connectivity and networks to some extent reflect microscale alterations in synaptic plasticity and neurotransmitter expression. Next, our focus shifts to the micro mechanisms of TMS antidepressant effects, analyzing how they operate at the molecular level.

4.2.3 Molecular mechanism

rTMS induces long-lasting excitatory or inhibitory postsynaptic potentials in neurons by high-frequency repetitive stimulation. This phenomenon, known as long-term potentiation (LTP) or long-term depression (LTD), persists over extended periods. Extensive stimulation can alter the adjustment and reorganization of connections between neurons, influencing the expression of neurotrophic factors and neurotransmitters within the brain. These effects may be linked to alterations in gene expression and protein synthesis at deeper levels. Previous research has indicated that TMS can modulate levels of BDNF and neurotransmitters (GABA, glutamate, DA, 5-TH) in patients with depressive disorders. Changes in these neurotransmitter levels reflect the impact of TMS on the micro-metabolic state of the brain and are closely related to clinical outcomes in patients.

BDNF is associated with MDD and many other neuropsychiatric disorders ( 63 ), playing a crucial role in synaptic plasticity ( 64 ). A study employing high-dose rTMS guided by neuronavigation in depressed patients demonstrated that responders to rTMS exhibited elevated BDNF levels compared to sham stimulation controls ( 65 ). Another controlled study reported increased BDNF levels following rTMS, which inversely correlated with depressive symptom severity ( 66 ). Fundamental research suggests that rTMS modulates BDNF levels, thereby exerting neurotrophic and neuroprotective effects. The neuroprotective action of rTMS may involve promoting neuronal proliferation and differentiation while inhibiting apoptosis. Feng et al. found that rTMS treatment over 3 weeks in a depression model of rats promoted cell proliferation in the hippocampal region ( 67 ). Moreover, rTMS suppresses apoptosis mainly through modulation of apoptosis-related protein expression levels. Gao et al. applied 20 Hz rTMS for 7 consecutive days in rats with transient cerebral ischemia and observed upregulation of Bcl2 expression along with downregulation of Bax expression ( 68 ).

Under normal circumstances, there exists a delicate balance between GABA and Glu in the central nervous system. The inhibitory action of GABA counteracts the excitatory effects of Glu, thereby maintaining normal neural function. Research indicates that rTMS can modulate the synthesis and release of Glu and GABA in the CNS. Using MRS, studies have investigated changes in these neurotransmitters during treatment. One study found that after 20 sessions of 10Hz rTMS, there was no significant change in GABA levels in the left DLPFC, while Glu levels increased ( 69 ). Another study using MRS measured GABA levels before and after 25 sessions of 10Hz rTMS, revealing a significant elevation in prefrontal cortex GABA levels post-treatment. These findings are crucial for understanding the neurochemical mechanisms of depression and developing new therapeutic approaches ( 70 ). Additionally, research has shown that after iTBS treatment, the GABA/Glx ratio decreased in the frontal cortex, reflecting alterations in the balance between excitatory and inhibitory processes within the brain ( 71 ). Basic experimental studies have indicated that TMS stimulation can influence the activity of GABA transporters and the expression of GAD 65/67, leading to increased levels of frontal Glu/Gln and NAA. Furthermore, studies applying rTMS to rats for 15 days demonstrated significant increases in GABA and Glu release in the hippocampus and striatum, while levels in the hypothalamus decreased ( 72 ). Trippe et al. observed changes in the expression of glutamate decarboxylase (GAD) following different patterns of rTMS stimulation in rats: upregulation of GAD65 expression and downregulation of GAD67 expression ( 73 ).

Neuroimaging studies have shown that TMS can modulate the reward circuitry in patients with depression, thereby exerting antidepressant effects. Researchers propose a mechanistic perspective: TMS enhances dopamine release in brain regions associated with the reward network (e.g., prefrontal cortex, amygdala, striatum, and ventral tegmental area), potentially ameliorating anhedonia and cognitive impairments in individuals with depressive disorders. A PET study revealed a significant increase in dopamine levels following rTMS stimulation of the left prefrontal cortex, suggesting a facilitative effect of rTMS on dopamine release ( 74 ). However, another PET study utilizing L-[b-11C] DOPA to assess endogenous dopamine synthesis rates found no change in striatal dopamine synthesis rate (k value) after a 10-day course of rTMS treatment in 8 patients with depressive disorders ( 75 ). Controversies and uncertainties persist regarding the precise impact of TMS on dopamine dynamics.

Most antidepressant medications (e.g., SSRIs) exert their effects by modulating the serotonin system, and the antidepressant action of TMS may also involve modulation of 5-HT levels. A sham-controlled rTMS study indicated no change in plasma serotonin levels following rTMS treatment, yet binding of 5-HT2A receptors (a subtype of the serotonin receptor family) in the brain correlates positively with symptom improvement in the DLPFC and negatively in the hippocampus ( 76 ). At a microscopic level, TMS affects not just one neurotransmitter but modulates neurotransmitter levels across multiple neural circuits, thereby influencing overall brain excitatory-inhibitory balance and neuroplasticity, ultimately leading to improvements in depressive symptoms. Overall, TMS operates through multilayered, multidimensional regulatory mechanisms to rebalance brain function. The interactions of these mechanisms form a complex regulatory network, necessitating comprehensive exploration of its deeper therapeutic mechanisms.

4.3 Limitations

This study utilized bibliometric methods to analyze the evolution and trends in TMS research in depression. Bibliometrics has several inherent limitations ( 77 , 78 ). Firstly, one limitation is that search terms may be restricted, potentially leading to incomplete retrieval. Nevertheless, we believe that the majority of TMS studies in depression have been included, with a sufficiently large sample size. Secondly, while WoSCC is the most commonly used and authoritative comprehensive database, this study exclusively utilized bibliometric data from WoSCC, overlooking other large databases ( 79 ). Thirdly, another limitation of this study is that due to software constraints, only English-language publications were analyzed, thereby overlooking several high-quality non-English articles. Lastly, we did not assess the quality of publications, hence treating high-quality and low-quality publications equally in our analysis.

5 Conclusion

This study employed bibliometric methods for the first time to review the research history and current status of TMS in the field of depression from 1999 to 2023. It conducted a visual analysis of publication trends, countries, institutions, authors, journals, and keywords. The study revealed a sharp increase in relevant literature in recent years, highlighting significant attention and rapid development in this area. The United States emerged as the leading contributor to research output, with Toronto University and Daskalakis ZJ prominent in institutional and individual contributions. The journal BRAIN STIMULATION published the most articles in this field.

Through an in-depth exploration of stimulation patterns, molecular mechanisms, brain regions, and integration with other brain imaging technologies, this study delineates the research focus and cutting-edge directions of TMS in the treatment of depression. Enhancing the antidepressant efficacy of TMS and probing its underlying brain neurobiological mechanisms have been the focal points of scientific endeavors over the past 25 years. The trend towards personalized precision therapy persists, leveraging individual-specific multimodal parameters, machine learning, and big data analytics. While neuro-navigation techniques aid in achieving precise targeting, initial successes have been observed in rTMS treatments tailored to specific depressive symptoms based on specific neural circuits. Nonetheless, numerous challenges remain, including standardizing TMS stimulation parameters, constructing treatment response prediction models, and conducting long-term follow-up studies to comprehensively assess research status and optimize the therapeutic potential of TMS. Alongside the evolution of multimodal techniques in machine learning, radiomics integrates analysis across multiple dimensions such as patient genotypes, phenotypes, brain structure, and function, facilitating early diagnosis and treatment optimization for depressive disorders. This approach aims to achieve personalized dynamic treatment feedback, thereby amplifying the therapeutic impact of TMS in treating depressive disorders.

In summary, TMS technology demonstrates extensive potential applications and significant implications for treating depressive disorders. The hotspot analysis and trend insights from this study provide valuable direction for future research, offering a solid reference point to potentially advance and innovate depression treatment techniques.

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material. Further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding authors.

Author contributions

JY: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft. TT: Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft. QG: Data curation, Writing – original draft. KZ: Data curation, Writing – original draft. AZ: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing. TW: Writing – review & editing. CY: Funding acquisition, Writing – review & editing. XL: Writing – review & editing. NS: Funding acquisition, Methodology, Writing – review & editing.

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This study was supported by the Shanxi Natural Science Fund Project (20210302123257, 20210302123251), and 136 Medical Rejuvenation Project of Shanxi Province.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Van Eck and Prof. Chaomei Chen for developing the VOSviewer and CiteSpace software.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Keywords: transcranial magnetic stimulation, depressive disorder, brain mechanisms, efficacy, bibliometrics, visualization analysis

Citation: Yang J, Tang T, Gui Q, Zhang K, Zhang A, Wang T, Yang C, Liu X and Sun N (2024) Status and trends of TMS research in depressive disorder: a bibliometric and visual analysis. Front. Psychiatry 15:1432792. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1432792

Received: 20 May 2024; Accepted: 22 July 2024; Published: 08 August 2024.

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Copyright © 2024 Yang, Tang, Gui, Zhang, Zhang, Wang, Yang, Liu and Sun. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Ning Sun, [email protected] ; Xiaodong Liu, [email protected] ; Chunxia Yang, [email protected]

† These authors have contributed equally to this work and share first authorship

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