Abstract
Over the past two decades, retail research has evolved into a core domain of marketing and management scholarship, mirroring transformative shifts in consumer behavior, supply chain operations, and global sustainability agendas. However, its thematic development remains fragmented, hindering a cohesive understanding of the field's evolutionary trajectory. To address this gap, this study adopts a theory‐informed framework integrating institutional theory, knowledge diffusion, and technological disruption to examine the intellectual structure of retail research. Leveraging BERTopic, dynamic topic modeling, and entropy‐based analysis on 36,433 Scopus‐indexed publications (2003–2023), this study traces the evolution of 29 distinct research topics across journals and countries. The findings identify three dominant intellectual pillars of retail scholarship: governance and safety, digital consumer ecosystems, and operational resilience, with AI‐enabled retailing emerging as a key frontier reflecting societal and technological change. Rather than proposing a static conceptual framework, this study develops a mechanism‐based explanation for retail knowledge evolution—institutional anchoring sustains core topics, knowledge diffusion drives thematic expansion, and shock‐driven reconfiguration redirects scholarly attention amid disruption. This study reconceptualizes topic popularity as a structurally embedded outcome shaped by the interaction of institutional pressure, diffusion processes, and technological change, rather than a purely descriptive trend. These results provide a theoretically grounded account of how retail research topics persist, expand, and decline over time, and offer empirically derived implications for retail governance, digital strategy, and resilience planning.