The research topics on e-grocery: Trends and existing gaps

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse through a systematic literature review the main topics studied on a relatively new concept: e-grocery. This study examines the existing literature through the use of some interactive Scopus applications with the goal to provide: (1) a better understanding of the main topics that have been analysed up to now; (2) the principal methodologies that have been used; and (3) the challenges that still exist as well as literature gaps. First, we provide a summary of what has been previously researched in the field, analysing the trends regarding time, sources, authors, countries and document types. Then, tokenization, and a natural language process (NLP) that applies the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) method, is used to extract the main topics in the field. We obtain that the research topics in the discipline have always been linked with technological changes, innovation and diffusion, and environmental effects have been a cornerstone since the origin of the field. In comparison with other fields in transport economics, we notice that experimental design and choice modelling are not very popular. As a step towards future research, we propose an integrative framework for e-grocery consumer behaviour that starts from the Engel-Kollat-Blackwell (EKB) model.