Regional Tourism Performance Research: Knowledge Foundation, Discipline Structure, and Academic Frontier

Abstract

In order to promote the prosperity and development of the research on “regional tourism performance” and better guide the practice of regional tourism development, this paper gives a basic and comprehensive review of the research activities on “regional tourism performance.” Data were collected from 418 English papers (2004–2020) collected from the Web of Science database. This study uses CiteSpace and Gephi to analyze the development of the thematic research from four dimensions: research overview, knowledge base, discipline structure, and research frontier. The study found that “regional tourism performance” is still a hot spot of the future. The existing literature on “regional tourism performance” mainly focuses on constructing models, exploring influencing factors, and innovating management models to improve tourist satisfaction, enhance regional tourism competitiveness, and promote regional economic growth. Panel data, entropy index, data envelopment analysis, bootstrap truncated regression models, coupling coordination degree, and spatial variation are the main research methods. Since 2016, cultural tourism, heritage tourism, rural tourism, tourism destinations competitiveness, and regional tourism governance have become hot topics in the thematic research. This paper is helpful to improve the research efficiency of the thematic research, promote the theoretical results to better guide the practice, and improve the level of regional tourism performance. However, this paper has limitations in terms of concept differentiation and data accuracy.