Tourism research progress – a bibliometric analysis of tourism review publications

Purpose Tourism review (TR) celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2020. The purpose of this paper is to proffer a holistic overview of TR based on bibliometric analyses of the publications from 2001 to 2019. Design/methodology/approach The research method entails performance analyses and science mapping analyses on TR. The performance analyses engage a sequence of bibliometric statistics, including citation analysis, most cited authors and papers, most influential and productive authors, countries and institutions to name a few. The authors also used visualization of similarities viewer to perform the science mapping analysis of TR based on co-citations of cited authors, bibliographic couplings of authors and countries and co-occurrences of authors’ keywords from 2001 to 2019 and from 2014 to 2019. To examine the thematic evolution using SciMAT, a de-duplicating process was conducted in which 1,485 keywords were refined to 128 word groups before thematic evolution map and strategic diagrams for the three sub-periods were generated. Findings The thematic evolution map revealed ten thematic areas. The key themes of each of these thematic areas are destination studies, tourism destination and hospitality tourism; destination studies, competitiveness and innovations, co-operations and experience tourism; business studies, sports tourism, tourism destination and satisfaction; quality studies, networks, social studies and co-operation; business model and sports tourism; tourism management and tourism destination; political studies, perception and satisfaction; political studies, sustainability studies, social studies and health tourism; behavior, perception and satisfaction; and cultural tourism and tourism destination. Research limitations/implications The study has managed to unveil the key trends of publications, authors, affiliations, nations and authors’ keywords. The findings are useful for potential authors to have a quick snapshot of what is expected from and what is happening in TR. Originality/value The study serves as a historical record of TR’s publications. It presents comprehensive bibliometric analyses of the publications in TR and identifying the key research trends.