Bibliometric map shows technology dominates sustainable tourism research while governance stays peripheral

A bibliometric analysis of 1,044 Scopus-indexed publications has mapped how technology-related sustainable tourism research is organised, revealing a field that grew rapidly after 2020 but remains concentrated in a small group of countries and author communities, with governance and evaluation concepts occupying a visibly marginal position. The study, published in Discover Sustainability, applied bibliometric performance analysis and science-mapping techniques in VOSviewer to publications issued between 2010 and 2023, examining publication growth, co-authorship patterns among countries and authors, keyword co-occurrence, and how often governance- and evaluation-related terms appear and connect within the literature.

The analysis identified a prominent core where sustainability and technology concepts intersect, centred on sustainable development, smart tourism, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, big data, and digital transformation. These themes formed the most prominent cluster in the keyword co-occurrence structure, indicating that scholarly attention has clustered around technological applications. Publication output, citation visibility, and international collaboration, however, were concentrated within a limited set of countries and author communities, indicating that the field’s research base is narrow rather than globally distributed.

A central finding concerns governance visibility. Terms related to governance and evaluation were identifiable in the corpus but remained less prominent and less connected than the dominant sustainability and technology concepts. In network terms, governance vocabulary sits at the periphery of the knowledge structure, linked weakly to the core themes rather than integrated into them. The study describes this as a diagnostic signal about how technological sustainability claims are organised within tourism scholarship, without drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of any technology.

To test whether these patterns were artefacts of the source selection, the researchers conducted a retrospective source-type audit and a sensitivity analysis on a conservative journal-only subset of 611 publications. The principal patterns proved stable. Annual publication trends in the subset were nearly identical to the full corpus, with a correlation of r = 0.999, and the leading indicators were largely retained: nine of the ten leading countries and 18 of the 20 leading keywords reappeared in the reduced dataset. This robustness check supports the conclusion that the observed concentration and the peripheral position of governance terms reflect structural features of the indexed literature rather than database noise.

The study contributes a diagnostic framework combining three lenses: knowledge structure, research concentration, and governance visibility. Applied together, these lenses allow researchers to assess how technological sustainability claims are organised within tourism scholarship, where collaborative capacity is located, and how visible governance concepts are in the conversation. As a bibliometric mapping exercise, the work describes the state of the literature rather than evaluating the effectiveness of any technology, and its scope is limited to Scopus-indexed publications from 2010 to 2023. Within those boundaries, it offers a quantitative portrait of a fast-growing field whose technological core is well developed while its governance dimension remains comparatively thin and weakly connected.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric mapping of technology-related sustainable tourism research

Article Title: Mapping knowledge structures, research concentration, and governance visibility in technology-related sustainable tourism research

Article References: Al Bahri, K. S. K., & Kassim, A. A. M. (2026). Mapping knowledge structures, research concentration, and governance visibility in technology-related sustainable tourism research. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04691-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04691-8

Keywords: bibliometrics, sustainable tourism, smart tourism, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, big data, digital transformation, governance, VOSviewer, science mapping, research concentration, Scopus