The past, present, and future of travel and tourism literature: Insights from a bibliometric review

Purpose – This study identifies and maps the past, present, and future of travel and tourism literature by drawing insights from a bibliometric analysis of papers from the Scopus database. The study has two objectives: (i) to explore and identify the different theoretical characteristic of extant travel and tourism literature, (ii) to identify emerging research trends, gaps, and potential future research areas in travel and tourism literature.

Methodology/Design/Approach - Meta-data for 15,647 peer-reviewed articles, published across 2104 journals, was downloaded from Scopus, with the bibliometric software VOSviewer used to analyze, map, and visualize publication trends therein.

Findings – Analysis revealed the identification of burgeoning research areas, setting agendas for future work within the travel and tourism domain. To understand the evolution of key research themes over time in travel and tourism, we identified major and minor themes using a period-wise thematic analysis.

Originality of the research – By analysing publication patterns, collaboration networks, and citation impact, we provide a comprehensive overview of knowledge dissemination and collaborative dynamics within the travel and tourism community. Our study also provides a significant contextual contributions to travel and tourism literature by exploring the evolution of dominant themes and their temporal growth.