Go Wild for a While? A Bibliometric Analysis of Two Themes in Tourism Demand Forecasting from 1980 to 2021: Current Status and Development

Abstract

Despite the fact that the concept of forecasting has emerged in the realm of tourism, studies delving into this sector have yet to provide a comprehensive overview of the evolution of tourism forecasting visualization. This research presents an analysis of the current state-of-the-art tourism demand forecasting (TDF) and combined tourism demand forecasting (CTDF) systems. Based on the Web of Science Core Collection database, this study built a framework for bibliometric analysis from these fields in three distinct phases (1980–2021). Furthermore, the VOSviewer analysis software was employed to yield a clearer picture of the current status and developments in tourism forecasting research. Descriptive analysis and comprehensive knowledge network mappings using approaches such as co-citation analysis and cooperation networking were employed to identify trending research topics, the most important countries/regions, institutions, publications, and articles, and the most influential researchers. The results yielded demonstrate that scientific output pertaining to TDF exceeds the output pertaining to CTDF. However, there has been a substantial and exponential increase in both situations over recent years. In addition, the results indicated that tourism forecasting research has become increasingly diversified, with numerous combined methods presented. Furthermore, the most influential papers and writers were evaluated based on their citations, publications, network position, and relevance. The contemporary themes were also analyzed, and obstacles to the expansion of the literature were identified. This is the first study on two topics to demonstrate the ways in which bibliometric visualization can assist researchers in gaining perspectives in the tourism forecasting field by effectively communicating key findings, facilitating data exploration, and providing valuable data for future research.