Science Mapping of Tourist Mobility 1980–2019. Technological Advancements in the Collection of the Data for Tourist Traceability

Abstract

The tracking of tourist movements is an essential aspect in the management of sustainable tourist destinations. The current information and communication technologies provide innovative ways of collecting data on tourist movements, but it is still necessary to evaluate tools and methods of study for this challenge. At this point, mobile technologies are the best candidate for this task. Given the relevance of the topic, this paper proposes a mapping science analysis of publications on “movement of tourists” and “traceability.” It has been carried out in the two main sources WOS and SCOPUS. The term “traceability” is brought from industry and technology areas to be applied to the tourist movement/mobility tracking and management. The methodological scheme is based on a selection of search criteria with combinations of terms. The sources of specialized information in applied social sciences and technology were then selected. From there, the searches have been executed for their subsequent analysis in three stages—(I) relevance analysis filtering the results to obtain the most pertinent; (II) analysis of articles with similarity thematic, authors, journals or citations; (III) analysis of selected papers as input for the mapping analysis using Citespace. The automatic naming of clusters under the selected processing confirms that the analysis of movements is a valid scientific trend but research-oriented from the perspective of traceability is non-existent, so this approach is novel and complementary to existing ones and a potential contribution to knowledge about tourist movements. Finally, a set of methodological considerations and a classification of information capture tools are proposed. In this classification, mobile technology is the best option to enable tourist movement analysis.