Calibrating Evolution of Transformative Tourism: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Transformative tourism (TT) has been gaining a lot of attention over the past few years due to its power to transform both the individual and the world we live in, in a positive way. Although presently consisting of a plethora of studies, transformative tourism lacks the lens of a bibliometric approach to track its growth in a more objective and quantitative manner. In this article, a total of 250 publications were analysed using several bibliometric performance metrics, science mapping techniques, such as citation analysis, co-occurrence, and co-authorship, as well as enrichment procedures. By combining these methods, the study identifies the most prolific journals, reference studies in the field, key authors, collaboration patterns, geographic distribution, preferred methods, major research topics, as well as an overall research timeline in this area of study. Findings suggest that transformative tourism could become the heart of tourism in the upcoming years as it begins to take deeper roots through new junctions and discoveries, appealing to more researchers and practitioners, with the literature on TT thus gaining momentum. This paper contributes to fill a research gap and capture the evolution of the fast-growing concept of transformative tourism using bibliometric analysis. The article provides useful insights as well as further research directions for both researchers and tourism practitioners interested in this field of study.