Trends in tourism research

Abstract:

Although the boundaries of tourism research have been widely discussed through the adoption of a scientific area to a multidisciplinary approach, the discussion is still open. Tourism academics are organized like a tribe or a community so closed that its scientific advances are not imported by other disciplines. The discussion usually ends with the rankings of authors and journals that also contribute to funnelling out knowledge. This research attempts to understand the boundaries of tourism research to draw in trends and topics that should be emphasize in and out of tourism community. Based upon a collection of 63,176 papers, neural network analysis is applied to unveil countries, journals and authors’ expertises as well as convergence points in academia through the content analysis of keywords, affiliated countries, journals and citations. The findings contribute as a guide for scholars and to the discussion of the boundaries of tourism whether it be as a trans- or interdisciplinary approach. The full picture that this paper allows to have about tourism research also represents a critical analysis about the evolution of tourism research since its very beginning emphasizing its weakness and strengths. The study ends with a few suggestions to raise the interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity that the tourism research deserves.