Accessible Tourism: A Bibliometric Analysis from 2000 to 2021

Abstract

The term "Accessible Tourism" was first used in 1989. This term has the characteristic of being transversal. The aim of this work is to find out the current state of scientific production in this area of tourism in order to be able to answer future questions and identify new lines of research. To this end, we have carried out a bibliometric analysis covering the first two decades of this century. After defining the keywords, a search was carried out in Web of Science and the results were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively using VOSviewer. This analysis shows that from 2018 onwards, publications increased considerably, reaching a peak in 2020, mostly in the areas of geography and economics, as research in the area of tourism is still very recent. The number of authors is reduced to around twenty, with one of them standing out significantly in terms of number of publications and citations. The conceptual analysis shows the variety of terms used by researchers and how they have evolved over time, the most commonly used being "people" and "disability", with others appearing such as "inclusive tourism" connected to "management" or "sustainable tourism", which are more akin to current management.