What Does the Concept of Resilience in Tourism Mean in the Time of COVID-19? Results of a Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on tourism, giving significant importance to resilience strategies for this sector. Indeed, over the past three years, an increasing amount of research has been conducted on tourism resilience without any overall analysis of these publications. This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis in order to identify research trends in the field as well as explore the various gaps in the literature on the subject studied during and after the pandemic. A selection of 114 Scopus-indexed articles published between 2020 and early 2023 on tourism resilience was analyzed by two bibliometric tools, VOS viewer and R bibliometrix. The results show that China, the United States, and Spain are the leading countries in this field of research. The articles’ authors, the affiliations, and the countries involved in research in this field were not able to compose a close, extensive, and collaborative network. The journal Sustainability (Switzerland), published by MDPI, is at the top of the list. This work identifies three dominant study themes: (1) tourism and sustainable resilience; (2) livelihood resilience; and (3) community resilience. This study provides a benchmark for future researchers with new study directions in the field of tourism resilience.