For the study, the team assembled publicly available Chinese-language posts and comments from 13 platforms mentioning Xiaozhou Village, an informal settlement known for its waterways, narrow lanes, Qing-era oyster-shell masonry, old banyan trees and close relationship with a nearby art academy. The initial retrieval produced 39,921 records, from which the researchers removed irrelevant, duplicated, empty and promotional material. Their final corpus contained 2,850 posts and 9,643 comments. Because the same place name also referred to other Chinese locations, a television drama and unrelated tourism material, every retrieved record was individually assessed for relevance. Publicly visible records were analyzed without recruiting participants or contacting their authors; identifiers and contact details were removed or masked.

To quantify expressed sentiment, the researchers first used a Chinese language model to annotate records with scoreable text on a scale from strongly negative to strongly positive, then fine-tuned a 102.3-million-parameter Chinese RoBERTa transformer as a three-class classifier. Of the 12,493 records in the corpus, 11,741 had text usable for annotation and modeling; 752 comments contained only emoji, stickers or other material that could not be scored and were excluded from the models. The classifier was trained on 8,218 records and tested on 1,762, achieving an accuracy of 0.803 and a macro F1 score of 0.792. A second independently developed model re-annotated a stratified sample of 498 posts, producing a Pearson correlation of 0.914 and substantial categorical agreement.

The researchers also coded three levels of engagement: passing or informational mention, one purposive visit, and repeated visits or extended dwelling. Independent re-coding of 499 posts gave 79.0% exact agreement for engagement depth, with Cohen’s kappa of 0.695 and a quadratic-weighted kappa of 0.724. The analytical model treated 18 binary lexicon features, platform indicators and post length as predictors of a continuous sentiment score. These features covered vernacular architecture, ecological elements, artistic practices, atmospheric qualities, consumption and specific problems such as crowding, commercialization, access, dilapidation and disappointment. Gradient boosting was selected after comparison with ordinary least squares and random forest models, with a ten-fold cross-validated R² of 0.137, root mean squared error of 0.635 and mean absolute error of 0.495.

That explanatory performance was modest: the 18 textual cues accounted for only a limited share of the variation in sentiment and were not intended to capture the full determinants of visitors’ experiences. SHAP, or Shapley additive explanations, was used to estimate each feature’s marginal contribution to model predictions rather than its causal effect in the physical environment. The strongest positive model contributions came from narratives of discovering a “hidden gem,” with a mean SHAP value of 0.221 and 95% confidence interval of 0.210 to 0.232; food and consumption contributed 0.205, and descriptions of quietness or slow pace contributed 0.157. Ancient banyans contributed 0.152, oyster-shell walls 0.150, photography 0.097 and sketching 0.087.

The largest negative contributions were expressions of disappointment, at −0.766 with a 95% confidence interval of −0.810 to −0.721, and references to dilapidation and litter, at −0.583 with a 95% confidence interval of −0.618 to −0.550. Crowding, cost and ticketing, access and parking, and over-commercialization also received negative contributions, although generally smaller ones. Because disappointment appeared in 3.0% of posts and dilapidation in 3.9%, the authors argued that overall positivity persisted more because strong negative themes were uncommon than because positive cues consistently outweighed them. These attribution values characterize the fitted model; they do not establish that particular features cause favorable or unfavorable evaluations.

Activity type alone did not explain the pattern. After adjustment for post length and platform, sketching had no detectable association with whether environmental problems were mentioned, with an odds ratio of 1.12 and p-value of 0.795, while photography had a similar null association with problem mentions at 1.05 and p=0.863. Photography, however, was associated with markedly less negative expression overall, with an odds ratio of 0.43 and p=0.0006, whereas sketching showed no detectable difference at 0.75 and p=0.381. A corrected lexicon was critical to that conclusion. An earlier feature combined the act of drawing or painting with terms for studios, academies, examination ateliers and graffiti, producing an apparent association between sketching and negativity. Separating artistic practice from the institutions surrounding it removed the result; posts mentioning institutional art terms were more negative, even though no such difference appeared among people actually describing painting.

Engagement depth remained the more consequential variable. Among 2,686 posts for which depth could be established, negative sentiment rose across the three levels on the annotation measure. Models controlling for post length and platform produced odds ratios of 2.12 for the intermediate category and 3.25 for repeated visitors or residents relative to passers-by, while post length had no independent association with negativity at 0.97 and p=0.523. Adding activity variables left the pattern largely unchanged. A sensitivity analysis excluding posts that contained either painting-practice or art-institution terms also retained the gradient, with negative shares of 11.0%, 23.7% and 27.5%. When author position was added, however, the intermediate contrast weakened and the odds ratio for the most deeply involved group fell from 3.29 to 2.14. The most defensible conclusion is therefore a robust contrast between sustained involvement and passing contact, rather than a perfectly monotonic progression through all three categories.

Who wrote also mattered. Among 1,795 posts with identifiable author positions, local residents were the most critical: 33.3% of their 72 posts were negative. General visitors had a negative share of 22.8%, while media or promotional accounts had 7.5% and commercial accounts 1.0%. Established artists were an exception, with 13.0% negative posts among 46 posts attributed to that group, although their relatively favorable result did not persist after adjustment. The authors say several explanations remain possible: established artists may hold commercial premises and therefore have incentives to protect the village’s public image, or artists most dissatisfied with local conditions may already have left. The commercial concentration of positive commentary also means that aggregate platform sentiment cannot be treated as a simple proxy for the views of residents or visitors, many of whom never post.

The result challenges theories predicting that stronger engagement should make a place seem better. Processing-fluency and effort-justification accounts suggest that repeated exposure or investment can encourage favorable evaluation, while recreation specialization and solastalgia predict more exacting judgments from specialists and people attached to places undergoing change. Xiaozhou’s pattern aligned with the latter: sustained involvement supplied both a standard against which the village could be judged and a stake in whether it met that standard. Yet naming specific conditions did not rise monotonically with depth; deeply involved authors often discussed deterioration generally rather than listing individual problems, so the central outcome was negative expression rather than the frequency of environmental terms. The study does not establish whether such critical expression reflects greater attention, greater attachment, selection of more concerned writers or some combination of these factors.

Several limitations prevent a causal or population-wide interpretation. The study was cross-sectional, relied on what people chose to publish and inferred engagement from text rather than surveying participants. One author could contribute multiple posts, but stable identifiers were unavailable, while comments were nested within posts; the analysis did not correct for either clustering, meaning its confidence intervals may be too narrow. The corpus spans 2008 to 2026, with coverage becoming much denser after 2018, and Xiaozhou was treated as a theoretically informative single case rather than a statistically representative sample. Reverse causation also remains possible: people already predisposed to notice decline may be more likely to become deeply involved. The evidence therefore supports an association between sustained engagement and critical expression, not proof that time spent in Xiaozhou produces negativity. It also suggests that aggregate visitor satisfaction may remain high even when the people most dependent on a place’s environmental conditions express more concern.

Subject of Research: How engagement depth is associated with negative expressions about environmental decline in Xiaozhou Village, Guangzhou.

Article Title: Attentional reorganization in heritage environments: depth of engagement and the expression of environmental decline

Article References: Li, S., Xia, Q., Huang, S., Huang, S., Lv, Y., Jiang, Y., & Chen, X. (2026). Attentional reorganization in heritage environments: depth of engagement and the expression of environmental decline. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1800968. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1800968

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1800968

Keywords: environmental psychology, heritage tourism, place attachment, Xiaozhou Village, social media analysis, explainable AI, sentiment analysis, solastalgia, urban villages, environmental perception, Attentional, reorganization

The core of the argument targets three assumptions embedded in mainstream technology acceptance research, particularly the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology and its consumer extension. The first concerns digital capability. In conventional models, a person’s skills and resources appear as a facilitating condition, one predictor among several that nudges adoption at the margin. The authors argue that in rapidly digitalising destinations, capability should instead be understood as a stratified, layered resource that governs whether an unassisted evaluation can occur at all. A tourist with low competence may still complete a task by leaning on a companion, a receptionist, or a guide, but that assistance substitutes a channel: the judgement formed is partly about the helper rather than the system, and the standard model never sees the difference.

The second assumption concerns trust. Most tourism studies treat trust as a single belief aimed at a single object, usually a platform or a provider. But a visitor crossing a border must judge several distinct things at once: the intermediary booking platform, the payment infrastructure, the local supplier delivering the service, and the state whose agencies run entry, registration, and data protection. The new framework separates these into four referents, each capable of carrying independent beliefs about competence, benevolence, and integrity. Peer trust, the diffuse confidence tourists place in reviews and ratings written by other travellers, is retained as a fourth referent because it is the one to which visitors with low competence and no institutional familiarity most often turn when screening the other three.

Trust does not sit still among these referents. Drawing on trust transfer theory, the authors describe how a judgement borrowed from one actor moves to another when the visitor perceives a salient association between them, such as ownership, endorsement, or institutional affiliation. Someone who completes an electronic visa without difficulty may approach a national tourism application with a favourable prior, but only if the application seems to belong to the same authority. This borrowed trust is efficient, because it saves the visitor from appraising every new system from scratch, and fragile, because it rests on thin evidence. The framework predicts that trust acquired by transfer is less resistant to disconfirmation than trust earned through direct experience, so a single failed payment at a state-operated kiosk could degrade a visitor’s assessment of the destination’s public digital systems as a whole. The mechanism linking the failure back to the source is calibration, the return path by which experienced performance revises not only the belief about the specific technology but also the belief about the referent from which trust was borrowed, powered by expectation disconfirmation and attribution.

The third assumption concerns experience quality, which acceptance research almost always models as a terminal outcome at the end of a causal chain. The authors instead model it as recursive and asymmetric. A trip is not a single transaction: a visitor failed by a ticketing application at nine in the morning carries that information into every later encounter of the day. The evaluation formed at an early touchpoint revises trust in the same technology, in the referent that lent it credibility, and in other technologies perceived as associated, before the next touchpoint arrives. The asymmetry comes from the well-established negativity bias in psychology: successful operation tends to be absorbed into the background and yields only a modest positive increment, while failure is salient, attributed, and produces a larger negative increment. If that holds for smart tourism technologies, linear models understate the cost of unreliability and overstate the return to added functionality, and design attention should shift from feature inventories to failure design.

The framework, called DITAE for Digital Inclusion, Trust, Acceptance and Experience, treats digital inclusion as three tiers with different temporal positions. Tier 1 is functional access: the material and environmental conditions under which an interface can be reached and read at all, including a functioning handset, adequate data at the moment of need, roaming provision, and an interface language the traveller can read. Tier 2 is enacted competence: the operational, informational, and transactional skills required to complete a task, with transactional skills such as authenticated payments being the most demanding because errors are costly and often irreversible. Tier 3 is realised conversion, the actual obtainment of the intended benefit after use, which the authors stress is not the same as marketing conversion; a purchased ticket that proves unusable at the gate is a funnel success but not a conversion in their sense. The first two tiers gate use, the third follows it.

This tier structure has a statistical consequence that gives the analysis its bite. Conventional surveys recruit respondents who have already attempted or completed use, so the people held back at the access or competence gates simply never enter the sample, and converters are mixed with non-converters unless outcomes are recorded. Because the same competence that permits an unassisted attempt also shapes perceived usefulness and effort expectancy, the resulting estimates are plausibly biased with respect to the visiting population. Inclusion, the authors emphasise, is situational rather than purely demographic: a thirty-year-old software engineer whose foreign card is declined, whose roaming data is throttled, and who cannot read the kiosk’s labels is, at that moment, digitally excluded. Vulnerability is produced by the encounter rather than carried into it, and the proper unit of observation becomes the tourist–task pair.

To ground the framework, the authors turn to Uzbekistan, explicitly as an illustration rather than a test. The country’s internet penetration stood near 89 percent at the start of 2025, and it entered the very high group of the United Nations E-Government Development Index in 2024, yet its infrastructure subindex exceeds its human capital subindex by nearly twelve points, a contextual sign that connectivity has outrun the educational base from which digital skills are drawn. Entry and stay run through state platforms: citizens of roughly ninety states enter visa-free while about fifty-six more use the electronic visa, and all foreign citizens staying beyond three working days must register, usually through their accommodation. Meanwhile, 8.2 million foreign citizens entered for tourism in 2024, spanning visitors who share language, script, and payment infrastructure with the destination and visitors who share none, with Latin and Cyrillic scripts coexisting on signage. The tourism product concentrates in four World Heritage cities, where fieldwork on Bukhara has separately documented tensions between digital provision and physical accessibility.

The central implication is stated as a formal proposition: among visitors who state a pre-encounter intention to use a smart tourism technology, intention converges across the inclusion tiers they subsequently occupy, while realised conversion diverges sharply by tier. The gating tiers do not prevent a visitor from forming an intention; they prevent the visitor from realising it. Intention alone is therefore an unsafe indicator of inclusive digital transformation, and studies that measure only intentions will find nothing where the framework predicts a substantial effect. For practice, the authors suggest destinations design for the failure path, stationing staffed non-digital fallbacks at mandatory touchpoints, shift reporting from adoption counts to conversion rates, and treat front-line assistance as tourism infrastructure where the educational base lags telecommunications provision, since the framework expects larger short-run gains from it than from added platform functionality.

The article is careful about its own status. It reports no new empirical data, its Uzbek material is macro-level and contextual, and several propositions, including the fragility of transferred trust, the asymmetric weighting of failure, and the privacy prediction that unfamiliar visitors lean harder on generalised country perceptions when estimating data risk, are labelled as hypotheses awaiting experimental or longitudinal tests. The authors even state the strongest arguments against their own framework, from parsimony to the possibility that existing constructs already absorb the new elements, and specify the four-stage research agenda by which each proposition could be rejected. If the evidence holds, however, the framework’s reach may extend beyond tourism: the three-tier structure separating pre-use gates from post-use conversion speaks to any government reporting digital progress through infrastructure indices while remaining silent about who actually obtains the outcomes those services exist to deliver.

Subject of Research: Digital inclusion, multi-referent trust, and recursive experience quality in tourist acceptance of smart tourism technology in fast-digitalising destinations

Article Title: Digital inclusion, trust, and experience quality: a conceptual framework for smart tourism technology acceptance in fast-digitalising destinations, with illustration from Uzbekistan

Article References: Dushanova, Y., Ibadullaev, E., Isroilov, B., Khamzaeva, D., & Kushmanov, J. (2026). Digital inclusion, trust, and experience quality: a conceptual framework for smart tourism technology acceptance in fast-digitalising destinations, with illustration from Uzbekistan. Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 8, Article 1961668. https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2026.1961668

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fhumd.2026.1961668

Keywords: smart tourism, digital inclusion, technology acceptance, trust transfer, experience quality, digital divide, Uzbekistan, heritage tourism, DITAE framework, realised conversion, digital inequality, e-government

The stakes of the question are far from trivial. Birding participants in the United States spend an estimated 279 billion dollars annually, support roughly 1.4 million jobs, and generate more than 90 billion dollars in income. Beyond the economics, birding has been linked to measurable improvements in cognition and mental well-being. But when it comes to the formal framework of ecosystem services, the benefits people obtain from ecosystems, traditionally grouped into provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural categories, the cultural side of the ledger has remained stubbornly hard to characterize. Nonmaterial benefits such as identity, skill, and experience resist the monetary valuation methods that work well for recreation’s market footprint, and coastal ecosystems have been especially under-examined in this respect.

To cut through that ambiguity, the team adopted a framework that breaks cultural ecosystem service benefits into four distinct categories: experiences, the ways people encounter and perceive ecosystems, from tranquility to the thrill of observing a species; identities, how individuals understand themselves in relation to the natural world; capabilities, the knowledge and skills that engagement with nature cultivates; and cultural goods, the tangible products such as festivals and guided events that both enable participation and generate social benefits. The researchers argue that this decomposition makes seemingly unmeasurable benefits identifiable and, crucially, usable in conservation planning.

Because culture is so deeply tied to place, generalizing about birding benefits from a single site is risky. The study therefore employed a most-similar-systems comparative design. Barnegat Bay and San Francisco Bay share key ecological and recreational characteristics: both are major multi-bay estuarine systems, critical migratory stopovers on their respective coastal flyways, and established birdwatching destinations of genuine cultural importance. Yet they differ dramatically in scale and context. Barnegat Bay encompasses roughly 280 square kilometers of shallow lagoon habitat behind developed barrier islands, with a year-round watershed population of 560,000 that nearly doubles in summer. San Francisco Bay spans about 4,134 square kilometers, is home to nearly 8.5 million people, and has lost more than 90 percent of its historic wetlands to urban development, making the surviving habitat all the more precious to shorebirds and waterfowl.

Rather than surveying a statistically representative sample of birdwatchers, a notoriously difficult group to sample given the enormous gradient from casual backyard observers to obsessive listers, the researchers turned to 31 key informants: experienced practitioners including conservation NGO staff, tourism professionals, government agency employees, and birding guides, many of them dedicated birders themselves. Sixteen informants came from Barnegat Bay and fifteen from San Francisco Bay, recruited through purposive and snowball sampling and interviewed in person or by phone between August 2025 and February 2026. A mixed-methods questionnaire of 27 items combined multiple-choice and Likert-scale questions with open-ended prompts, and responses were analyzed through deductive coding based on the four benefit categories, supplemented by inductive sub-codes for threats, diversity, and rare bird sightings that emerged from the data itself.

The most striking finding was what dominated: experiences. Fourteen of sixteen Barnegat Bay informants and thirteen of fifteen San Francisco Bay informants spontaneously discussed experiential dimensions of birding, far more than any other benefit category. And within experiences, one motif rose above all others at both sites: the sighting of rare or vagrant birds, species that are difficult to detect or that appear far outside their normal range. Nine of sixteen Barnegat Bay informants emphasized rarity, often more frequently than any single iconic species, while five San Francisco Bay informants did the same. This aligns with the ecology of coastal flyways, where vagrant occurrences are more common than inland, and it underscores that unpredictability and novelty, not just charismatic flagship species, drive much of birding’s recreational value.

The character of those experiences, however, diverged sharply between the estuaries. Barnegat Bay informants overwhelmingly framed birding around tranquility and escape, with fourteen of sixteen reporting that birders come to find calm and to flee urban environments while watching wildlife. San Francisco Bay informants were split on both points, with only 54 percent agreeing that tranquility was a draw and 47 percent agreeing that escaping cities motivated visitors. Instead, Bay Area informants tied meaningful experiences to individual factors: where a birder comes from, and how specialized their skills are. One informant noted that the single most iconic species for any visitor is highly specific to their origin, observing that a phenomenal birder once arrived thrilled to see snowy egrets, birds locals consider commonplace. Seasonality structured experience at both sites, with waterfowl defining winter, migratory shorebirds dominating spring and fall, and breeding terns, avocets, and stilts anchoring summer in the Bay.

Identity and capabilities revealed equally telling contrasts. Contrary to expectations from cultural ecosystem services research, neither community tied its identity to a single iconic bird species; fourteen of sixteen Barnegat Bay informants and twelve of fifteen San Francisco Bay informants rejected that idea. Instead, identity operated as a subculture of practice. San Francisco informants discussed it far more often, describing a community split between community-science birders who monitor the bay for conservation and rarity chasers who pursue vagrants from South America or Asia, and characterizing the region as home to some of the best birders in the world. Barnegat Bay identity, when it surfaced, was about conversion into birding, as one tourism professional put it, a lot of fishermen are converted birders. On capabilities, informants at both sites agreed the general public lacks bird knowledge, a gap the authors argue demands attention from wildlife and land managers, since expertise remains concentrated among dedicated participants without intentional outreach.

Cultural goods exposed perhaps the sharpest regional divide. Twelve Barnegat Bay informants confirmed local birding events exist, and five described a rich crossover with coastal heritage: the Old Time Barnegat Bay Decoy and Gunning Show, the Pine Barrens Jamboree, and the Pinelands Short Course all blend birding with maritime tradition and regional culture. San Francisco Bay events, by contrast, from the Point Reyes Birding and Nature Festival to the Berkeley Bird Festival and Audubon-led walks offered nearly every day, remained largely insulated within the birding community itself, with little crossover programming. The authors interpret this as evidence that Barnegat Bay’s birding economy is embedded in broader coastal leisure and heritage tourism, while the Bay Area’s is a specialized, self-contained subculture.

The study’s broader message is that cultural ecosystem service benefits are co-produced through interactions between ecosystems, places, and cultural practices rather than being static attributes of any landscape, and that experiences, identities, capabilities, and cultural goods reinforce one another in loops: a rare sighting builds experience, experience forges identity, identity sharpens skill. Because the findings rest on a modest, purposively sampled pool of expert informants, the authors caution they are exploratory characterizations rather than population-level measurements. Even so, the practical implications are concrete. Managers in tranquil, heritage-rich Barnegat Bay might emphasize accessibility and multi-use coastal tourism, while San Francisco Bay managers could support advanced birding opportunities, habitat diversity, and community-science partnerships. And because unethical practices such as flushing birds or luring them with bait can harm vulnerable species, understanding what birders actually seek, especially the outsized demand for rarities, could let managers convert that enthusiasm into financial, educational, and conservation gains. As human dependence on cultural ecosystem services grows faster than on provisioning services, and as these benefits prove difficult to recover once degraded, place-grounded research like this may become the foundation for protecting them.

Subject of Research: Stakeholder perceptions of birdwatching benefits as cultural ecosystem services in Atlantic and Pacific flyway estuaries

Article Title: Characterizing stakeholder perceptions of birdwatching benefits as a cultural ecosystem service: a comparative study of Atlantic and Pacific flyway estuaries

Article References: Blair, P., Koprowski, J., Stoellinger, T., Williamson, R., & Dunning, K. (2026). Characterizing stakeholder perceptions of birdwatching benefits as a cultural ecosystem service: a comparative study of Atlantic and Pacific flyway estuaries. Frontiers in Bird Science, 5, Article 1895040. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbirs.2026.1895040

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fbirs.2026.1895040

Keywords: birdwatching, cultural ecosystem services, estuaries, Barnegat Bay, San Francisco Bay, Atlantic Flyway, Pacific Flyway, rare bird sightings, birder identity, heritage tourism, conservation management, mixed methods

The study’s theoretical backbone is Collins’s interaction ritual chain theory, a framework that treats experiences as sequences of shared, emotionally charged encounters that build momentum over time. Drawing on this theory, the authors constructed an integrated affect–cognition–behavior model in which immersive experience serves as the central bridge between what tourists perceive and what they intend to do. Authenticity, the study’s key input variable, is deliberately not treated as a single construct. Instead, the researchers operationalized four theoretically distinct dimensions: objective authenticity, which refers to the verifiable originality of objects and buildings; constructive authenticity, which concerns the meanings and narratives that tourists and destinations project onto places; existential authenticity, a state in which visitors feel more true to themselves through the encounter; and postmodern authenticity, the appreciation of simulations, performances, and playful re-creations that may have no original at all.

The empirical results are striking in their consistency. All four authenticity dimensions were significantly and positively associated with immersive experience, tourist satisfaction, and travel intention. In other words, whether a visitor cares about the provenance of a Ming dynasty courtyard, the story a guide tells about it, the feeling of escaping urban routine, or simply the enjoyable theatricality of a heritage performance, each perception feeds the same downstream pipeline. But the dimensions were not equal. Existential authenticity emerged as the strongest driver of immersion, suggesting that the sensation of becoming more fully oneself—feeling present, unburdened, and emotionally engaged—does more to pull a tourist into the experience than any measurable property of the physical site.

This finding carries real weight for the science of experience design. Immersion, in the sense popularized by Csikszentmihalyi’s flow research, describes a state in which attention narrows, self-consciousness fades, and the activity itself becomes absorbing. The study positions this state as a critical mediating mechanism: authenticity perceptions do not act on travel intention directly so much as they act through immersion. Once immersed, tourists reported significantly greater satisfaction, and immersion was also independently associated with stronger behavioral intention. Satisfaction, in turn, predicted travel intention directly, forming a second, parallel route from perception to action. The architecture of the model therefore resembles a dual-pathway system, with an affective route running through immersion and a more evaluative cognitive route running through satisfaction, both converging on the decision to travel.

Perhaps the most provocative results concern self-congruity, the degree to which a destination’s image matches a tourist’s own self-concept. The researchers hypothesized that self-congruity would act as a boundary condition, moderating the relationship between authenticity and travel intention, and the data confirmed this—but with a twist that complicates conventional wisdom. For existential authenticity, the moderating effect was positive: tourists who felt the village reflected who they are were especially responsive to the experience of personal authenticity, amplifying its effect on their intention to visit. For constructive and postmodern authenticity, however, the moderation was negative. When a destination’s curated narratives and staged performances aligned strongly with a visitor’s self-image, the independent effect of those authenticity dimensions on intention actually weakened, as if the self-congruity had absorbed or substituted for the authenticity signal.

Notably, objective authenticity showed no significant moderation at all. The verifiable age of a building or the documented originality of an artifact appears to influence travel intention regardless of whether the tourist sees the destination as an extension of themselves. This asymmetry is theoretically meaningful. It suggests that object-based authenticity operates on a relatively rational, evaluative channel that is insulated from identity processes, while the more constructed and performative forms of authenticity are entangled with how tourists define who they are. For a field that has debated the definition of authenticity for more than four decades, the finding provides rare empirical evidence that the different dimensions behave differently not just in magnitude but in kind.

The methodological approach deserves attention as well. The researchers collected survey data from Chinese domestic tourists visiting traditional villages, a context of particular urgency in China, where rapid urbanization has placed hundreds of historically significant settlements under pressure and where rural revitalization policy has made village tourism a centerpiece of cultural and economic strategy. Structural equation modeling, using the partial least squares approach, allowed the team to test the full network of relationships simultaneously, estimating direct effects, mediating pathways, and interaction terms within a single model. The sample size of 498 valid responses provides adequate statistical power for detecting the moderate effect sizes typical of psychological research on tourist behavior, and the measurement models were assessed against established criteria for reliability and discriminant validity.

The practical implications extend well beyond Chinese villages. Heritage managers and destination planners worldwide face a persistent dilemma: commercialization generates the revenue needed to preserve historic fabric, yet over-commercialization erodes the very qualities visitors come to experience. This study offers a more nuanced playbook. Because existential authenticity is the strongest driver of immersion, destinations should invest in experiences that let visitors participate rather than merely observe—craft workshops, homestays, festivals, and opportunities for genuine social interaction with residents. Because immersion and satisfaction form the mediating spine of the model, the quality of the on-site experience matters more than marketing claims of genuineness. And because self-congruity moderates several pathways, segmentation matters: tourists who see a village as an expression of their identity respond to different cues than those who evaluate it as external heritage.

The negative moderation effects also carry a warning for destination branding. If a village’s projected image becomes too tightly matched to a particular tourist identity, it may crowd out the independent contributions of constructed and postmodern authenticity, narrowing the destination’s appeal. A more open, less prescriptive brand identity could allow those dimensions to work on their own terms. Meanwhile, the null result for objective authenticity’s moderation suggests that conservation of authentic physical fabric remains a universally valuable investment, one that pays off across tourist types without depending on identity alignment.

As immersive technologies—from virtual reality reconstructions to gamified heritage trails—spread through the tourism industry, the study’s framework offers a template for evaluating them. The central insight is that the affective-cognitive bridge of immersion is where authenticity is converted into behavior, and that this conversion is conditioned by the tourist’s self-concept. A perfectly preserved village that fails to immerse will underperform a modestly staged one that succeeds, unless identity dynamics intervene. In the psychology of heritage travel, feeling real, it turns out, matters more than being real—and knowing who the visitor wants to be may matter most of all.

Subject of Research: Psychological pathways linking authenticity perceptions, immersive experience, satisfaction, and self-congruity to travel intention in traditional village tourism

Article Title: Back to the past: authenticity, immersive experience, satisfaction and self-congruity influencing travel intention in traditional villages

Article References: Mao, C., Chen, W., & Yu, T. (2026). Back to the past: authenticity, immersive experience, satisfaction and self-congruity influencing travel intention in traditional villages. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1604. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10163-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10163-z

Keywords: authenticity, immersive experience, tourist satisfaction, self-congruity, travel intention, traditional villages, heritage tourism, interaction ritual chain theory, structural equation modeling, cultural tourism, tourism psychology, rural revitalization

The study is grounded in the Cognition–Affect–Behavior framework, a classic model in environmental psychology that describes how people first perceive and interpret their surroundings, then experience emotional responses to those interpretations, and finally act. Applied to agricultural heritage tourism, the framework suggests that when visitors perceive a village, its landscapes, and its traditions as authentic, that cognitive judgment triggers affective consequences, chiefly an enhanced sense of well-being, which in turn motivates a behavioral outcome: the inclination to share the experience through storytelling. What makes the new research distinctive is that it does not treat authenticity or well-being as single, undifferentiated quantities. Instead, the team decomposed both constructs into measurable dimensions and tested which specific pathways carry statistical weight.

To do this, the researchers surveyed 402 visitors to three celebrated traditional villages in Anhui Province, China: Hongcun, Chengkan, and Xixinan. These settlements are outstanding examples of agricultural heritage tourism, places where centuries-old domestic architecture, working farmland, ritual life, and resident communities coexist and where tourism revenue supports the conservation of a living landscape rather than a frozen museum piece. Hongcun in particular is internationally known, but all three villages share the defining feature that makes them ideal laboratories for this kind of work: heritage is not staged for tourists but continues to function as part of daily village life. Visitors there encounter irrigation systems, ancestral halls, family compounds, and agricultural practices that are simultaneously attractions and lived realities.

The team analyzed the survey data using partial least squares structural equation modeling, or PLS-SEM, a statistical technique well suited to testing complex networks of hypothesized relationships among latent variables, which are constructs that cannot be observed directly and must be inferred from multiple questionnaire items. PLS-SEM allowed the researchers to estimate both the direct effects of perceived authenticity on storytelling tendency and the indirect effects that operate through well-being, while assessing how each dimension of authenticity contributed to the overall model. This dimensional approach is the study’s methodological backbone, and it is what enables the paper’s most interesting and nuanced findings.

First, the results confirm that tourist-perceived authenticity is not a monolith. The analysis identified five distinct components: ecological experience, cultural interaction, heritage reminiscence, personal reflection, and continuity of tradition. Ecological experience captures the visitor’s sense of the authenticity of the agricultural landscape and its natural setting. Cultural interaction reflects genuine engagement with residents and their customs. Heritage reminiscence involves the evocation of memory and nostalgia connected to rural and agrarian pasts. Personal reflection describes the inward turn, in which the authentic setting prompts visitors to contemplate their own identities and lives. Continuity of tradition, finally, is the perception that the practices on display are not performances but ongoing inheritances that persist across generations.

Second, and most importantly, the study demonstrates that both psychological well-being and subjective well-being mediate the relationship between perceived authenticity and storytelling tendency. Psychological well-being, in the tradition established by psychologist Carol Ryff, refers to deeper dimensions of functioning such as purpose in life, personal growth, autonomy, and positive relations with others. Subjective well-being, by contrast, is the more hedonic construct encompassing life satisfaction and the balance of positive over negative emotions. The finding that both forms of well-being carry the effect means that authentic heritage experiences do not merely make people feel pleasant in the moment; they appear to nourish something more durable, a sense that life is meaningful and going well, and it is this enriched state that travelers are moved to communicate to others.

Yet the mediation is not uniform across dimensions, and this is where the study becomes genuinely instructive for anyone concerned with heritage management. Cultural interaction, the dimension involving direct engagement with local people and their ways of life, showed a significant indirect effect on storytelling tendency only through psychological well-being, not through subjective well-being. In other words, meeting real farmers, watching real craftspeople, and conversing with real residents seems to elevate visitors’ sense of meaning and personal flourishing, and it is that elevation, rather than simple momentary pleasure, that drives them to tell stories. This suggests that the social fabric of a heritage village, the presence and openness of its community, is not a backdrop to the tourist experience but a central psychological ingredient in it.

Equally revealing are the pathways that failed. Personal reflection, the inward-looking dimension of authenticity, showed no significant indirect effect on storytelling tendency through either form of well-being. A visitor may stand in an ancient courtyard and be moved to deep introspection, but according to this data, that private contemplation does not reliably translate into the urge to narrate the experience to others. The implication is subtle: the most personally transformative aspects of heritage travel may also be the least communicable, or at least they do not travel through the well-being route that the study measured. For site managers, this cautions against assuming that encouraging solitary contemplative experiences will automatically generate the word-of-mouth advocacy on which heritage destinations increasingly depend.

The practical stakes of these findings are considerable. Agricultural heritage systems, from terraced rice landscapes to ancient irrigation networks, are recognized internationally as living heritage that must be conserved in use, not merely preserved as artifacts. Their survival depends on tourism economies that value them and on communities that see continuing benefit in maintaining traditional practices. If storytelling by satisfied visitors is a key channel through which heritage destinations build reputation and attract future support, then understanding what makes visitors into storytellers becomes a conservation strategy in its own right. The study suggests that managers should invest in the dimensions of authenticity that feed well-being, particularly opportunities for genuine cultural interaction with residents, and should treat community engagement not as an amenity but as infrastructure for both visitor psychology and heritage communication.

The research also contributes to a broader scientific conversation about why humans tell stories at all. Storytelling has long been understood as a fundamentally social behavior, a way of bonding, teaching, and transmitting culture, and a growing literature links narrative sharing to emotional arousal and self-relevant meaning. This study extends that literature into the heritage context, showing that the stories tourists tell are not simple advertisements for a destination but emotional byproducts of experiences that made them feel that life is richer and more meaningful. In that sense, every tale a traveler tells about a village like Hongcun is also a small act of heritage transmission, carrying the values of a living agricultural tradition into new audiences. The authors argue that their findings provide a theoretical basis for conserving living heritage and communicating heritage values in traditional villages, and the evidence they present makes a compelling case that the future of these landscapes may depend as much on the well-being of the people who walk through them as on the stones and fields themselves.

Subject of Research: The mediating role of tourist well-being in linking perceived authenticity to storytelling tendency in agricultural heritage tourism

Article Title: From tourist-perceived authenticity to storytelling tendency: the mediating role of well-being in agricultural heritage tourism

Article References: Hu, D., Guo, Y., Lu, Y., Song, Y., Shen, G., Xu, X., & Li, L. (2026). From tourist-perceived authenticity to storytelling tendency: the mediating role of well-being in agricultural heritage tourism. npj Heritage Science. https://doi.org/10.1038/s40494-026-03048-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s40494-026-03048-8

Keywords: agricultural heritage tourism, perceived authenticity, well-being, storytelling tendency, PLS-SEM, Hongcun, Chengkan, Xixinan, traditional villages, heritage conservation, Cognition-Affect-Behavior framework, cultural interaction

The core problem the researchers tackled is one that plagues heritage regions worldwide: individual sites are easy to designate and easy to visit, but the connections between them are rarely planned with any scientific rigor. Without a deliberate corridor structure, tourism flows concentrate on a handful of famous landmarks while equally significant sites nearby remain overlooked, and the regional destination system fragments into isolated attractions rather than an integrated whole. Corridors, in this framework, are not simply roads or hiking trails; they are functional linkages between heritage sources that channel visitors, interpretive themes, and investment along routes that make cultural and geographic sense.

To build the network, the team first identified what they call sources of heritage tourism, the anchor points from which corridors can radiate. Their analysis of the Yellow River Cultural Tourism Belt identified 40 such sources, distributed in a distinctive spatial pattern. Rather than being spread evenly, the heritage sites cluster into two belt-like concentrations that follow the river’s course, alongside eight multi-core clusters, where several significant sites group within reach of one another, and seven single-core clusters anchored by a single dominant attraction. This clustering structure matters because it determines where corridors can realistically form: links between sites within or between clusters are far more feasible, both logistically and in terms of visitor behavior, than connections across empty stretches of the landscape.

From these 40 sources, the researchers constructed a potential corridor network comprising 106 candidate heritage tourism corridors. The word potential is doing important work here. These are not existing, officially designated routes but hypothesized linkages derived from the spatial relationships among the heritage sources. The next challenge was to rank them, because a network of 106 corridors cannot be developed, marketed, or protected all at once. For this, the team turned to a classic tool of spatial science: the gravity model, which estimates the strength of interaction between two places based on their size or attractiveness and the distance separating them, in direct analogy to Newton’s law of gravitation.

Applied to the corridor network, the gravity model allowed the researchers to compute an interaction intensity for each of the 106 potential corridors and to sort them into five hierarchical levels. The resulting structure is strikingly pyramidal: 9 corridors in the top tier, 14 in the second, 28 in the third, 28 in the fourth, and 27 in the fifth, a configuration the authors summarize as a 9 + 14 + 28 + 28 + 27 hierarchy. In practical terms, this means a small number of high-strength corridors, presumably connecting the belt’s most powerful heritage clusters, could serve as the backbone of the entire system, while progressively larger numbers of weaker corridors fill in the network’s periphery. Such a hierarchy gives planners a ready-made sequencing strategy: consolidate the nine primary corridors first, then extend outward as capacity and demand grow.

A crucial strength of the study is that it does not stop at modeling. A gravity model can tell you where interactions should occur in theory, but tourists do not always behave as equations predict. To test whether the proposed corridors correspond to real patterns of interest, the researchers turned to virtual tourism flow data, digital traces of online attention and search behavior related to the heritage sites. By comparing the modeled corridor network against this flow network, they could ask a simple question: do the corridors the gravity model prioritizes actually attract medium to high levels of public attention? The comparison showed that they do, with heritage tourism corridors receiving a medium to high level of response in the virtual tourism flow network. That convergence between theoretical prediction and observed digital behavior is the study’s key validation, and it suggests the corridor hierarchy is not an artifact of the model but reflects genuine patterns of cultural interest.

The use of virtual tourism flow data is itself part of a broader shift in heritage and tourism research. Traditional studies of tourist movement relied on surveys, ticket sales, or costly GPS tracking, all of which are slow, expensive, and often limited to visitors who physically show up. Online search and social media signals, by contrast, capture the attention of the vast population that is considering a trip, not just those who take one. For a corridor network whose purpose is to stimulate new travel patterns rather than merely describe existing ones, that distinction is essential. A corridor can only succeed if potential visitors are aware of and interested in the sites it connects, and digital attention flows are one of the best available proxies for that latent demand.

The findings carry immediate implications for the management of the Yellow River Cultural Tourism Belt. By identifying two belt-like clusters, eight multi-core clusters, and seven single-core clusters, the study gives provincial and municipal authorities a shared spatial vocabulary for coordinating what has often been fragmented, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction development. The five-level corridor hierarchy offers a prioritization framework for infrastructure investment, interpretive programming, and marketing campaigns. Sites linked by top-tier corridors could be jointly promoted as multi-stop itineraries, spreading visitor demand from saturated landmarks toward under-visited neighbors, while lower-tier corridors mark the network’s growth frontier, signaling where protection and access improvements would yield the greatest future returns. The authors frame their work explicitly as a contribution to the revitalization of regional cultural heritage and the optimization of the heritage tourism destination system, and the optimization strategies they propose flow directly from the network’s structure.

Beyond China, the methodological template is arguably the study’s most exportable contribution. Many countries are pursuing linear heritage initiatives, from Silk Road routes to industrial heritage trails to river-based cultural corridors, and most face the same twin problems of identifying which linkages matter and validating them against real demand. The combination used here, clustering analysis to define sources, gravity modeling to rank potential corridors, and virtual tourism flow data to verify the result, is replicable in almost any region with a rich but dispersed heritage inventory. It also demonstrates how open digital data can substitute for expensive field campaigns in the early stages of corridor planning, lowering the barrier for resource-constrained heritage agencies.

The study, published open access in npj Heritage Science with support from the National Social Science Foundation of China, arrives at a moment when the Yellow River basin’s cultural future is the subject of intense national attention. Whether the 106 modeled corridors will ultimately be formalized as designated routes depends on policy decisions far beyond the scope of any single paper. But the research provides something those decisions have lacked: a quantitative, validated map of where the connections between heritage sites are strongest, arranged in a hierarchy that tells planners where to begin. In turning the scattered treasures of the Yellow River into a structured network, Wang and Cheng have shown that the geography of cultural heritage can be planned with the same precision as the geography of roads and rivers, and that the digital footprints of millions of curious travelers can help light the way.

Subject of Research: Network construction and spatial classification of cultural heritage tourism corridors in the Yellow River Cultural Tourism Belt of China

Article Title: Network construction and spatial classification of cultural heritage tourism corridor in the Yellow River Cultural Tourism Belt of China

Article References: Wang, S., & Cheng, J. (2026). Network construction and spatial classification of cultural heritage tourism corridor in the Yellow River Cultural Tourism Belt of China. npj Heritage Science. https://doi.org/10.1038/s40494-026-03026-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s40494-026-03026-0

Keywords: Yellow River, cultural heritage, tourism corridors, network analysis, gravity model, heritage tourism, China, spatial clustering, virtual tourism flow, npj Heritage Science, destination planning, cultural tourism belt

The study focuses on what researchers call red tourism, travel to sites associated with revolutionary history and the founding narratives of the People’s Republic of China. This form of heritage travel has grown into a major segment of the domestic Chinese tourism market, encompassing memorial halls, former battlefields, and locations tied to the early history of the Communist Party. Unlike conventional sightseeing, red tourism carries an explicit historical and ideological payload, which makes it a natural laboratory for studying how experiences become memories and how memories become stories. The authors argue that red memory, defined as a visitor’s reconstructed understanding and remembrance of revolutionary history, has been under-theorized in the tourism literature, and their study sets out to place it at the center of the explanatory chain.

To build their model, the researchers drew on a classic framework in psychology known as Cognition–Affect–Conation, or C–A–C. This framework, with roots stretching back to early work on the trilogy of mind, proposes that human responses unfold in three stages: people first perceive and interpret a stimulus, then react to it emotionally, and finally form intentions or take action. Applied to tourism, the framework suggests that the experiences a visitor has at a site shape what they remember, those memories shape how they feel about their lives, and those feelings shape whether they intend to share the story. The study tests each of these links empirically, treating red memory as a context-specific cognitive construct rather than a generic travel recollection.

The empirical setting was Nanhu Lake in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, a site of singular importance in Chinese revolutionary history as the location where the First National Congress of the Communist Party concluded aboard a boat on the lake. The researchers collected survey responses from 597 visitors who had toured the site, a sample that spanned a broad demographic range: just over half were male, roughly a third were between 25 and 34 years old, and nearly three-quarters had visited red tourism destinations at least twice before. The questionnaire measured four dimensions of the tourism experience, along with red memory, subjective well-being, and storytelling intention, using established scales adapted from prior research and translated with careful attention to cross-language validity.

The four experience dimensions capture distinct psychological levers. Sensory experience refers to the degree to which a visit makes a strong impression on the senses, from striking visuals to the atmosphere of a place. Authentic experience measures whether visitors perceive the site as genuinely preserving original revolutionary culture, local traditions, and the natural ecology of the area. Co-creation experience reflects the visitor’s active participation in shaping the visit through interaction with service staff, a concept drawn from the service marketing literature on value co-creation. Novelty experience, finally, captures the feeling of being transported to another time and place, of escaping the trajectory of daily life. Each of these dimensions has been studied in isolation in prior tourism research, but the study treats them as parallel inputs into a single memory-forming process.

On the analytical side, the study combined two complementary statistical approaches. The first, partial least squares structural equation modeling, or PLS-SEM, is a technique for estimating networks of relationships among measured variables, well suited to testing whether the hypothesized chain from experience to memory to well-being to storytelling holds across the sample. The second, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, or fsQCA, takes a fundamentally different view. Rather than asking whether each variable has an average effect across all cases, fsQCA asks which combinations of conditions are sufficient to produce an outcome in particular cases, recognizing that different visitors may reach the same destination by different routes. Using both methods on the same dataset allowed the researchers to report both net associations and configurational pathways.

The PLS-SEM results supported the full theoretical chain. Sensory, authentic, co-creation, and novelty experiences were each positively associated with red memory, meaning that visitors who reported stronger impressions on any of these dimensions also reported deeper reconstructed understanding of revolutionary history. Red memory, in turn, was positively associated with subjective well-being, suggesting that engaging with a meaningful historical narrative contributes to visitors’ sense of happiness and life satisfaction. Finally, subjective well-being was positively associated with storytelling intention, the self-reported likelihood of posting photographs online, telling others about the trip, and sharing the story with friends and relatives. The measurement model passed standard checks for reliability and discriminant validity, and the researchers assessed common method bias using established diagnostic procedures.

The fsQCA analysis added a layer of nuance that a single-path model cannot capture. It identified two distinct configurations of experience dimensions that were sufficient for high storytelling intention. The first combined strong sensory experiences with strong novelty experiences, a pairing that suggests visitors who are vividly stimulated and feel transported out of their everyday lives are primed to share. The second combined authentic, co-creation, and novel experiences, indicating an alternative route in which perceived genuineness, active participation, and a sense of escape jointly drive the impulse to tell the story. Notably, no single experience dimension was by itself sufficient, underscoring the configurational logic that multiple ingredients must converge. These two pathways are described as alternative rather than mutually exclusive, and they complement the average effects estimated by the structural model.

The theoretical significance of the work lies in how it positions red memory. Much of the tourism literature treats memorable experiences as generic, but this study argues that memory formed at ideologically and historically charged sites is context-specific, shaped by the content of the history itself rather than merely by the pleasure of the visit. The finding that such memory feeds into subjective well-being connects red tourism to a broader research stream linking travel to happiness, including cross-lagged panel studies showing that tourism experiences predict later well-being. It also aligns with prior evidence that recollection and storytelling mediate between tourism experiences and well-being outcomes, and with work showing that historical storytelling can deepen value co-creation among heritage tourists.

For site managers and destination planners, the practical implications are concrete. The two sufficient configurations point to design priorities: experiences that stimulate the senses while creating a feeling of novelty, and experiences that combine authenticity with opportunities for visitors to participate actively. The prominence of co-creation in the second pathway suggests that interactive engagement with guides and staff is not a peripheral service feature but a core ingredient in whether visitors leave as storytellers. Because tourist-generated storytelling operates through both interpersonal channels and social media, the reach of a single visit can extend far beyond the site itself, transmitting historical and cultural meanings to audiences who never set foot there. The authors note that the dataset is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request, and the study received ethical approval and informed consent from all participants, with funding from provincial and national research foundations in China.

Subject of Research: The psychological pathway from red tourism experiences through red memory and subjective well-being to storytelling intention

Article Title: From red tourism experiences to storytelling intention: the roles of red memory and subjective well-being

Article References: Yang, S., & Yang, J. (2026). From red tourism experiences to storytelling intention: the roles of red memory and subjective well-being. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1585. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10157-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10157-x

Keywords: red tourism, red memory, subjective well-being, storytelling intention, tourist experience, PLS-SEM, fsQCA, heritage tourism, Cognition-Affect-Conation framework, Nanhu Lake, co-creation, novelty

The scale of the recent acceleration is striking. According to the study, led by Jiayuan Li and Xin Xie of the Future Design School at Harbin Institute of Technology in Shenzhen, together with Chunwen Yang and Walton Wider, 79.7 percent of all publications on industrial heritage appeared in just the last decade, between 2016 and 2025. This surge was accompanied by sustained growth in citations, indicating that the field is not merely producing more papers but generating work that other scholars actively build upon. The researchers attribute this intensification to mounting global pressure on post-industrial cities, where deindustrialization has left vast tracts of obsolete infrastructure that demand decisions about demolition, preservation, or transformation.

Geographically, the study found that research output is concentrated in two powerhouses: Europe and China. This distribution reflects the different but converging pressures facing each region. Europe, home to the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, has spent decades grappling with the legacy of abandoned mines and factories in regions such as the Ruhr Valley in Germany and the coalfields of Wales, where heritage tourism has been promoted as a legitimate strategy for post-industrial economic restructuring. China, by contrast, has experienced an extraordinarily rapid wave of industrial restructuring, with cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Nanjing, and Guangzhou racing to decide the fate of factory complexes that ceased operation only within living memory.

To dissect the intellectual architecture of the field, the team employed a battery of computational bibliometric techniques. Performance analysis tracked publication and citation trends over the 35-year window, while VOSviewer software was used to construct co-citation and co-word networks, revealing which scholars and concepts form the field’s foundations and which themes cluster together. CiteSpace, a tool designed to detect emerging trends and transient patterns in scientific literature, was then applied to identify term bursts, periods when particular keywords suddenly spike in scholarly attention. The methodology followed established science-mapping principles, including the systematic review reporting standards set out in the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, lending rigor to the identification and screening of the publication corpus.

The co-citation analysis uncovered three distinct knowledge domains that anchor the field. The first centers on industrial heritage tourism, identity, and memory, a tradition tracing back to foundational work on mines and quarries as tourist attractions and on the role of heritage in community identity. The second domain revolves around adaptive reuse and sustainable urban regeneration, encompassing research on how obsolete industrial buildings can be converted to new functions while reducing environmental impacts, a topic increasingly framed through the lens of the circular economy. The third domain concerns governance and participatory planning, examining how stakeholders, communities, and authorities negotiate the future of industrial sites, from Berlin’s Oberschöneweide district to post-industrial landscapes where public participation has reshaped redevelopment outcomes.

Co-word analysis reinforced these domains while revealing the thematic glue that binds them. Tourism interpretation and place identity emerged as tightly linked concepts, reflecting scholarly consensus that how industrial sites are narrated to visitors shapes whether local communities embrace or resent their heritage designation. Adaptive reuse and conservation for sustainable regeneration formed another thematic cluster, connecting building-level technical decisions to city-scale sustainability goals. A third cluster addressed site management within urban redevelopment, highlighting the practical challenges of integrating heritage protection into planning systems that often prioritize land value and capital accumulation. The researchers note that journal and institutional rankings differed depending on whether productivity, citation impact, or network connectivity was measured, a sign that the field’s most prolific contributors are not always its most influential connectors.

The term-burst analysis added a temporal dimension, showing how scholarly attention has surged around specific concepts at specific moments. Bursts were detected for terms including industrial heritage itself, tourism, adaptive reuse, authenticity, quality, history, heritage, frameworks, and spatial distribution. These bursts chart the field’s evolution: early work concentrated on defining industrial heritage and establishing its touristic value, while later phases saw intensifying focus on authenticity debates, the development of sustainable management frameworks, and the spatial dimensions of heritage within urban fabric. The trajectory suggests a maturing discipline moving from descriptive case studies toward theoretical frameworks and evaluative methods, including multicriteria decision analysis and fuzzy approaches for assessing the value and reuse potential of industrial buildings.

Beneath the bibliometric patterns lies a profound tension that has animated the field since its inception: the dissonant nature of industrial heritage itself. Unlike castles or cathedrals, factories and mines are often sites of labor conflict, environmental degradation, and painful economic loss. Scholars in the field have long wrestled with whose heritage is being preserved and whose is being erased, examining how communities’ sense of deprivation can persist even as their industrial past is packaged for tourists. The new mapping confirms that questions of social value, community recognition, and authorized heritage discourse remain central, with recent work exploring digital and participatory methods for involving superdiverse urban populations in deciding what aspects of their industrial past deserve to survive.

The study’s authors argue that the four research areas identified, heritage interpretation, adaptive reuse, governance, and urban redevelopment, should be understood not as separate silos but as connected components of a single sustainability challenge. A converted power station becomes a cultural venue only if governance structures support its operation; a heritage tourism strategy succeeds only if interpretation resonates with local identity; and urban regeneration flourishes only when conservation performance is measured against real social and environmental outcomes. Yet the analysis also exposes gaps. The authors call for comparative and longitudinal research on conservation performance, public access, social value, and local outcomes, noting that much of the existing literature remains anchored in individual case studies rather than systematic cross-site evaluation over time.

For policymakers, urban planners, and heritage practitioners, the mapping offers a practical roadmap. As cities worldwide confront climate targets, housing shortages, and the economic aftershocks of deindustrialization, the adaptive reuse of industrial buildings is increasingly promoted as a strategy that conserves embodied carbon, preserves cultural memory, and catalyzes neighborhood revitalization simultaneously. The evidence base for those decisions, this study shows, has grown explosively but unevenly, concentrated in Europe and China and organized around three intellectual traditions that are only now beginning to converge. The derived datasets and analysis outputs from the research are being made publicly available under a Creative Commons license, inviting the next generation of scholars to extend the map into regions, languages, and questions that the first 35 years of industrial heritage research have yet to fully reach.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric mapping of global industrial heritage research on conservation, adaptive reuse, and sustainable urban regeneration

Article Title: From industrial remains to sustainable futures: mapping the knowledge structure and emerging directions of industrial heritage research

Article References: Li, J., Xie, X., Yang, C., & Wider, W. (2026). From industrial remains to sustainable futures: mapping the knowledge structure and emerging directions of industrial heritage research. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 468. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01777-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01777-y

Keywords: industrial heritage, bibliometric analysis, adaptive reuse, heritage tourism, sustainable urban regeneration, co-citation analysis, term-burst analysis, heritage governance, place identity, urban redevelopment, Web of Science, VOSviewer