Mapping a Sustainable and Responsible Tourism Paradigm: A Bibliometric and Citation Network Analysis

Abstract

Sustainable tourism as a concept, and responsible tourism as its successful implementation, represent two major challenges for researchers in different academic fields and for tourism stakeholders in destinations responsible for sustainable tourism planning, policies, actions, and outcomes. This paper provides a bibliometric inventory of research published in the field of sustainable and responsible tourism (SRT). The results identify the publications on SRT; author cooperation between countries and their nodes; the disciplinary areas of SRT and the influential works, journals, and authors; and the bibliometric clusters. The aim of the study was to determine whether SRT has merged into a single “responsustainable” tourism discourse that could shift the mainstream paradigm of sustainable tourism towards the full content of SRT. The analysis was unable to confirm this shift towards an expanded paradigm of SRT but the results do indicate that SRT will remain an important area of tourism research for the foreseeable future.