The aim of this research was to explore the theoretical essentials of knowledge production in international marketing reports from a dataset of 682 journal articles. A computer-aided co-citation network analysis of 15,960 citations, meticulously voted on by more than 10,000 authors, traces the historical timeline of the developmental paths and paradigm shifts in international marketing studies. We ranked overall first-author, article and journal citations for the ten-year period 1997-2006 and mapped this co-citation network of knowledge by analyzing the centrality of the top 30 articles during this period. This study not only traces international marketing development more clearly but also offers potentially useful information for researchers in planning their future studies in this area.