Abstract
Island ecosystems have very specific physical, economic and socio-cultural characteristics, which are shared by most of these ecosystems regardless of their geographical area. These characteristics include well defined geographical boundaries that lead to a greater degree of isolation, lack of economically exploitable resources, great external dependence for consumption, cultural and natural heritage with a high uniqueness level and a high concentration of endemic plant and animal species. All of them are responsible for the high development dependence level linked to the tourism activity of these ecosystems. Thus, island ecosystems are currently an important international tourism destination, where a great diversity of very attractive natural and cultural resources and of great heritage value are concentrated. This fact allows for the development of tourism activities of great heterogeneity among countries or regions of the world that host these island ecosystems. The aim of this research was to identify and analyze, through a bibliometric and bibliographic analysis, the scientific production indexed in the international Scopus database, which addresses the subject of use of cultural and natural resources by tourism in island ecosystems. This scientific mapping allows us to observe the evolution of scientific production in this field of study. The results show that this is a new subject (a large number of transient authors), predominantly affiliated with the United States and Spain. The most followed research lines to date are destination management followed very far by responsible environmental behavior and the impacts of sustainable development. However, the keywords with the highest co-occurrence show that the hot topics are tourism exploitation in the ecotourism field and sustainable tourism development. This research is considered the first bibliometric study carried out which is related to this thematic approach, providing a clear in-depth analysis for researchers and thereby facilitating the approach of future research work.
Highlights
Cultural and Natural Heritage Constant debates on the relevance of the cultural and natural heritage of territories established that such assets are an irreplaceable source of identity and inspiration, which can be used as key elements to promote sustainable development [1,2]
The Scopus database was selected with the purpose of identifying high-quality scientific material based on three characteristics: (a) application of rigorous quality standards through the Relative Quality Index, Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) [44]; (b) wide coverage in time compared to other databases, being more suitable for a citation analysis because Scopus provides about 20% more coverage than its main competitor, Web of Science (WoS) [45]; and (c) access to simultaneous downloads of a considerable number of references stored in detail as metadata [46]
The scientific production was made up of 185 documents identified in the international Scopus database
Summary
Cultural and Natural Heritage Constant debates on the relevance of the cultural and natural heritage of territories established that such assets are an irreplaceable source of identity and inspiration, which can be used as key elements to promote sustainable development [1,2]. Cultural-natural heritage is made up of the elements of nature, which are maintained in their original context, but intervened in some way by human beings [9] It defines cultural heritage as the set of tangible and intangible assets which are made up of elements that reinforce the sense of community with a self-identity and that are perceived by others as characteristic of the human group. They come from human creativity that is transmitted, modified and accumulated from generation to generation [9]
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