Intellectual Structure Of Wellness Tourism And Destination Loyalty Research: A Bibliometric Mapping Study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.66635/r8mbef44Keywords:
wellness tourism, co-authorship network, co-citation analysis, keyword co-occurrence, international collaboration, thematic map, VOS viewer, intellectual structureAbstract
Wellness tourism, tourist experience and destination loyalty are key constructs in tourism scholarship, but they have not been systematically integrated in the intellectual architecture that gives them life: their main proponents, collaboration among them and their thematic organisation. This paper presents the results of the network-oriented part of a bibliometric study of 13,551 documents (1980–2026) from 1,973 sources, processed using the workflow methodology of Biblioshiny/VOSviewer to explore author productivity and co-citation, international collaborations, keyword co-occurrence, citation networks, and thematic evolution. Han Heesup, Hall C. Michael, Kozak Metin, Sthapit Erose, and Scott Noel are the most prolific and well-connected authors, as well as the most locally cited, which represent two overlapping intellectual traditions: a tourism-studies core and a structural-equation-modelling/satisfaction-measurement tradition. The U.S. is the biggest producer of academic writing and the most globalised country for academic collaboration, followed by India and Italy, and then Australia, China, and the U.S. Both keyword co-occurrence and co-citation analyses show that a two-pole thematic structure exists, namely the sustainability/ecotourism pole, with its main anchor in the policy literature on sustainable development, and the tourist-experience/destination-loyalty pole, with its main anchor in psychometric models of satisfaction and destination loyalty (e.g. Fornell, 1981; Yoon & Uysal, 2005). A thematic map is a map that represents tourist destination and tourist behaviour as well-developed motor themes, tourism and sustainable tourism as niche themes and ecotourism, tourism development and sustainability as emerging or declining motor themes. The results give a systematic overview of the most prominent contributors to this field, the cooperation network, and the conceptual structure of the field, which can serve as a reference for the identification of influential work, possible co-operators and thematic gaps for further research in the field.
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