Bibliometric analysis of sustainable tourism using CiteSpace

Sustainable tourism has become a hot topic in the academic community; however, there is a need to conduct a more in-depth and comprehensive exploration of how this research field is organized and evolved. Therefore, using CiteSpace software, we conduct bibliometric analyses, unveiling this field's dynamic trends in collaboration, co-citation, and co-occurrence evolution. We find that there has been a consistent uptrend in publications in this field since 2013, covering diverse disciplines; besides, European institutions are forerunners in cooperation, and different regions have different collaboration priorities in topics; in addition, the most co-cited author is not the most influential, but the highly cited journals usually have a high impact; furthermore, future research will likely focus on the tourist experience and satisfaction and their pro-environmental behaviors. Compared with previous relevant studies, this paper is innovative as we comprehensively and multidimensionally view the evolution of sustainable tourism research, establish a new knowledge framework to depict the primary ideas of this field, and pinpoint the current challenges and future characteristics of research, which is theme-specific, clear and easy to understand this field's dynamic evolution, and instructive for future research and practice.