How tourism research integrates environmental issues? A keyword network analysis

Abstract

Bibliometric analytics has recently been gaining in importance. Specifically, mapping knowledge and inter-relations among studied subjects is bringing new insights to science, education, and practice. Such bibliometric analysis is applicable to tourist research and we offer an examination of such application to a bioculturally delimited cluster within the field. The main objective of this paper is to analyse author keywords (AK) in the Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism (HLST) category of the Web of Science (WOS) to establish the importance of nature related topics for tourist researchers. As a background and a starting point, it was necessary to identify the principal research topics studied within the whole HLST category. To achieve these objectives all the registers in the Core Collection of the WOS database of the category were downloaded. A co-word analysis was performed for subsequent clustering purposes and centrality parameters were calculated for the whole keyword network within the timeframe 1991 to 2020. The most frequently used words in the category were directly related to tourism and sport, while those referring to the natural environment occurred with a lesser frequency. Eight topics were identified during the analysis, with the tourism cluster having the largest number of components. A cluster dealing with the natural environment and sustainable development was identified and labelled the ECO-CLUSTER for which the principal keywords were: SUSTAINABLE TOURISM, CLIMATE CHANGE, ECOTOURISM and SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT. It was found that though the ECO-CLUSTER was relatively homogenous it remained relatively isolated from the rest of the HLST category. This study presents a unique attempt to perform a global analysis of the whole AKs network within the HLST category. It allows the identification of research gaps and improvement in the understanding of tourism research directions.