Global geographical and scientometric analysis of tourism-themed research
Tourism research literatures have increased rapidly in the past few decades while there have been few efforts to map the panorama of global tourism research. A scientometric analysis was applied to evaluate the performance status and research front using knowledge domain visualization techniques in this work. The data consists of 17,413 tourism-themed literatures retrieved from Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index databases since 1900. What were analyzed included the publication outputs, document types, productive publications, languages used frequently as well as fruitful countries/territories and institutions contributing to English articles and the co-citation network of references in the past decade. The cumulated literature records of tourism-related research have increased exponentially over past 40years, revealing that tourism research is in its rapid development stage. It turned out that there were fourteen types of documents and academic articles accounted for the largest proportion. Literatures were published in a wide range of 2082 publications, of which Annals of Tourism Research and Tourism Management were in the vanguard of the most productive journals for tourism research. English is the most popular language in publication. USA, UK and Australia were the most productive countries; New Zealand, Peoples R China, UK and Australia were the most close cooperation groups, and Austria; New Zealand, Japan and Peoples R China had the most innovation. The most productive institutes included Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Griffith University, University of Queensland, University of Surrey and Texas A&M University. The co-citation cluster analysis reveals the distribution of popular topics and the representative literatures during the past decade. Online tourism, consumer perceptions and behavioral intentions, tourism demand forecasting, as well as tourism destination competitiveness are the research frontiers of Tourism Discipline.
scientometric tourism science citation index social science citation index research frontiers knowledge base