Tourism poverty alleviation hotspots in China: Topic evolution and sustainable development

Abstract Understanding the hotspots and patterns of tourism poverty alleviation is of great significance to stakeholders. This study aims to comprehensively and scientifically understand the research hotspots, characteristics, trends, and future research directions in the field of tourism poverty alleviation, provide decision support for tourism stakeholders, improve the level of management and service quality of tourism, balance the distribution of tourism resources and interests, and promote high‐quality and sustainable development of tourism. First, we propose a dynamic nonnegative matrix factorization (DNMF) method to analyze the tourism poverty alleviation literature from 2012 to 2021, extract hot topics and topic words. Then, we propose a topic evaluation criteria to evaluate the effect of the extracted topics. Third, we propose a topic intensity model to calculate the intensity of hot topics that can track the evolution trend of hot topics in the past 10 years, and explore the future development trends of the tourism poverty alleviation. Finally, we put forward the countermeasures and suggestions for sustainable tourism poverty alleviation under the guidance of sustainable development theory. The experimental results show that DNMF has a good effect in topic extraction. The evolution process based on topic intensity reflects the evolution trend of China's tourism poverty alleviation. This study provides a theoretical foundations and technical support for the sustainable development of China's tourism poverty alleviation.