Abstract
Tourism related to the sea and boating activities is becoming increasingly popular and revolves around a range of leisure, water sports, nautical or other maritime activities. This article studies the main scientific contributions in this area, bearing in mind the complexity of finding a suitable definition of this concept. Hence, the aim of this paper is to analyze the scientific production from 1986 to 2020 in impact journals of the terms “nautical tourism”, “maritime tourism” and “marine tourism” considering the following variables: number of documents, number of articles, period being studied, Hirsch citations and index. The results show an increasing trend in terms of both the number of published articles and citations publications from 2007 onwards and the review of the literature raises the need to define a new concept: “blue tourism”. Future trends in research include terms such as tourist ports, quality of websites and blue economy.
Highlights
Despite the importance of maritime tourism in the local economic development of many countries, its dissemination in scientific journals has not followed a parallel development
Tourism has benefited from advances in scientific production, the specific field of nautical tourism has scarcely been studied compared to the evolution of the broader tourism sector and its future perspectives [1]
The number of articles was greater for Web of Science (WoS) between 2014 and 2017; this trend was reversed in with Scopus containing a greater number of articles in that year, this can be due to the number of articles—especially in top-tier journals—that are not yet in any issue and are still on the online version, which does not appear in the WoS search
Summary
Despite the importance of maritime tourism in the local economic development of many countries, its dissemination in scientific journals has not followed a parallel development. Finding a single suitable definition that encompasses boating tourism, nauticalrecreational sports and marine activities at sea or in other aquatic environments is a difficult task and there are multiple combinations of words that refer to this type of tourism: nautical, maritime or marine. As a prior step to the development of this work, the following words have been selected: nautical tourism, maritime tourism and marine tourism. These terms share conceptual similarities and, there are features that are related to all the terms such as recreational activities which are related to coastal zones and the sea, “nautical tourism” is considered to be a broader term that includes lakes, rivers and other aquatic environments where tourists can enjoy boating activities. Once reviewed the contents of articles related to river tourism have not been taken into account for this analysis
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