Abstract
This paper uses text data mining to identify long-term developments in tourism academic research from the perspectives of thematic focus, geography, and gender of tourism authorship. s of papers published in the period of 1970–2017 in high-ranking tourist journals were extracted from the Scopus database and served as data source for the analysis. Fourteen subject areas were identified using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) text mining approach. LDA integrated with GIS information allowed to obtain geography distribution and trends of scholarly output, while probabilistic methods of gender identification based on social network data mining were used to track gender dynamics with sufficient confidence. The findings indicate that, while all 14 topics have been prominent from the inception of tourism studies to the present day, the geography of scholarship has notably expanded and the share of female authorship has increased through time and currently almost equals that of male authorship.
Highlights
Recent years have evidenced an increased interest to tourism as a knowledge system [1] and to bibliometric analysis of tourism research output [2,3,4,5,6]
Subject index, headwords subject index, headwords 2868 articles articles journal mission statements 2834 articles articles articles multiple headwords as indicators of topical areas 27 subject areas topic areas keywords as indicators of topics 29 disciplinary focuses subject areas research topics and 41 sub-topics 19 research themes headword analysis content analysis of the subject indices content analysis based on random sampling from the article pool content analysis; relational analysis content analysis previous studies, expert opinions co-citation analysis, cluster analysis, text mining pre-identified themes countries by author continents and international regions by author, no trends
The interpretive concepts were identified as follows: customer satisfaction; service quality; purchase intention; value; and product attributes. These concepts were joined under the subject area ‘service quality and satisfaction’
Summary
Recent years have evidenced an increased interest to tourism as a knowledge system [1] and to bibliometric analysis of tourism research output [2,3,4,5,6]. Systematic evaluation of scientific output in a particular field of study using bibliometrics (statistical analysis of publications) is usually conducted from one of three main perspectives: an individual author, an academic journal, and an academic field [7]. At the academic journal level, studies are primarily concerned with issues of knowledge dissemination and transfer as well as journal quality and impacts [11,12,13]. Such studies are often used as guidelines to evaluate the quality of research output in academic institutions, make funding decisions, and help institutions formulate recommendations for tenure and promotion.
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