Scientific mapping of smart tourism: a content analysis study

Abstract

Smart tourism can be thought of as a whole ecosystem of smart tourists, smart technologies, and smart businesses. There are more than 952 academic studies related to Smart Tourism in the Web of Science (WoS) database. Therefore, it would be useful to examine the conceptual structure and thematic development of Smart Tourism. This study is to analyze the field of smart tourism using scientific mapping methods. Bibliometric data of 489 articles were downloaded from the WoS. This paper first conducts a co-occurrence analysis using VosViewer to determine the prominent terms and connections between them. Then, a content analysis is performed using SciMat to gain a deeper understanding of the field and its evolution from 2013 to 2022 for Smart Tourism. In this context, strategic maps, thematic networks of topics, and an evolutionary map were obtained to understand the field better by using SciMAT.