Mapping Pilgrimage Tourism Research Through Systematic Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Pilgrimage, or religious, tourism is regarded to be one of the primaeval forms of tourism. Also, an extensive amount of research on pilgrimage and religious tourism reveals the vitality of the field of study. The chapter aims to conceptualise the notion of pilgrimage tourism and prepare the knowledge map of the pilgrimage tourism literature. The chapter uses the Scopus database and applies a systematic literature review as well as a bibliometric approach to uncover the most prolific studies, authors, organisations, countries, and themes of pilgrimage tourism research worldwide. Also, the growth and development of knowledge in the field has been demonstrated. For the analysis and data visualisation the Biblioshiny package of R and visualization of similarities (VOSviewer) software is used. The findings uncover that the United Kingdom, Spain, and China are the most prolific countries; the studies are centered around the themes of heritage tourism, sustainable development, and coronavirus in the pilgrimage tourism research domain from the last few years.