Tourism and Sustainability: A Bibliometric and Visualization Analysis

Fernando Garrigos-Simon,Ismael Lengua-Lengua,Yeamduan Narangajavana-Kaosiri

doi:10.3390/su10061976

Fernando Garrigos-Simon, Ismael Lengua-Lengua + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su10061976

Copy DOI

Abstract

Sustainability is a growing research topic in tourism due to the importance of environmental and social issues, and the maintenance of patrimony and other facilities to conserve the potential of tourism destinations. Specifically, sustainability in tourism is crucial in order to guarantee a consistent development of destinations, measured by growth in income and employment. This relevance has been translated into an explosive growth in the sustainability literature regarding tourism, income, and employment. However, there is a lack of bibliometric and visualization research on tourism sustainability (TS), and specifically on its relationship with income and employment. This paper aims to present a bibliometric overview of TS research, and specifically TS related to income and employment. The current work analyzed 2279 references collected from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database and used the visualization of similarities (VOS)viewer program to graphically map the material. The study used co-occurrence of keywords, co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-authorship analyses. The results identify the development status and the leading trends in terms of impact, main journals, papers, topics, authors, institutions, and countries. The analysis and graphical presentations are relevant, as they can help researchers and practitioners better understand the state of the art of TS.

Highlights

Sustainability, and the need to understand the nature and limits of growth, has developed into an important policy issue in tourism literature in the last decade [1], becoming an “integral component of tourism policy and strategy” [2]
Combining the bibliometric analyses of sustainability in tourism, we found one paper about the use of grounded theory method in tourism research [44], one bibliometric paper about sustainability in hotel business [45], and some bibliometric papers related to urban sustainability [46] and urban sustainability governance [47], which could be applied to the field of tourism
In order to select the kind of tourism sustainability (TS) research to be evaluated, we retrieved all the papers that used the keywords “sustainability” and “tourism” simultaneously when concentrating on TS, and, in addition, the keywords “income” and “employment” when focusing on TS related to income and employment

Summary

Introduction

Sustainability, and the need to understand the nature and limits of growth, has developed into an important policy issue in tourism literature in the last decade [1], becoming an “integral component of tourism policy and strategy” [2] The explanation of the relevance of tourism sustainability in the literature is, essentially, due to the interdependence of tourism pressure and sustainability [3], and at the same time the difficulty of governing sustainable tourism [4], in-depth research is required This can be explained by the close relationship between sustainable tourism and sustainable development and, in particular, topics related to population, peace, ethics, prosperity, poverty, pollution, protection, and conservation [5]. The aim of this paper is to illustrate and described the bibliographic analysis carried out on the tourism sustainability (TS) literature, focusing on its relationship with income and employment. It will look at the lack of bibliometrics in TS, considering its relationship with income and employment, and, the relevance and contributions of our research

Objectives

Methods

Results