Progress on smart tourism research

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to conduct a systematic and quantitative review of published papers on smart tourism. More specifically, the paper aims to identify the smart tourism research life cycle, collaboration trends, main social structure, disciplinary approaches and foundations, research topics and methodological approaches. Design/methodology/approach Systematic quantitative review techniques were used to review smart tourism literature. Frequency analysis, network analysis, text mining techniques were performed on data obtained from 96 papers collected from three databases as follows: Web of Science, Scopus and EBSCOhost. Findings The smart tourism research life cycle has two turning points with an exponential increase: 2015 and 2017. The latter is mainly associated with the internationalization of collaboration. Social structure of smart tourism research was revealed. Many of the ideas and research trends are affected by one research cluster. Destination related articles are dominant in smart tourism research. Internet of things and tourist experience are less researched areas. Only a quarter of the articles was published in tourism and hospitality journals. In particular, there is a big gap in published papers in hospitality journals. An important gap from methodological aspect is limited number of qualitative studies with human subjects. The geographical limitation is high concentration of smart tourism studies in Korea. Research limitations/implications This study collected and analyzed only full papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Future research may consider including book chapters and/or conference proceedings. This study was mainly based on quantitative review techniques. Qualitative or mixed review techniques may be conducted. Originality/value This study is the first literature review on an increasingly popular topic of smart tourism.