Tourism and sustainability: A bibliometric and visualization analysis

Abstract

Sustainability is a growing research topic in tourism due to the importance of environmental and social issues, and the maintenance of patrimony and other facilities to conserve the potential of tourism destinations. Specifically, sustainability in tourism is crucial in order to guarantee a consistent development of destinations, measured by growth in income and employment. This relevance has been translated into an explosive growth in the sustainability literature regarding tourism, income, and employment. However, there is a lack of bibliometric and visualization research on tourism sustainability (TS), and specifically on its relationship with income and employment. This paper aims to present a bibliometric overview of TS research, and specifically TS related to income and employment. The current work analyzed 2279 references collected from theWeb of Science (WoS) Core Collection database and used the visualization of similarities (VOS)viewer program to graphically map the material. The study used co-occurrence of keywords, co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-authorship analyses. The results identify the development status and the leading trends in terms of impact, main journals, papers, topics, authors, institutions, and countries. The analysis and graphical presentations are relevant, as they can help researchers and practitioners better understand the state of the art of TS.