A Keyword Network Analysis of Tourism Literature from 2008 to 2019

As the tourism sector has become one of the fastest areas of growth in the contemporary business environment, tourism has been increasingly regarded as an important impetus to promoting export trade and economic growth in many countries. However, the tourism research field has not been reviewed systematically or comprehensively. Therefore, this study analyzes existing tourism literature by constructing keyword networks to identify the key concepts and issues that researchers are most interested in and to show changes in research trends. We collected 1,053 academic publications published between 2008 and 2019 in five leading journals to empirically show how keywords of paper are connected and form a network. Based on the degree of network centrality of keywords, we present the important keywords by year, by journal, and by time period to show similarities and differences in important concepts and issues prioritized by researchers. As a common result, it was found that service quality, customer satisfaction, and hotels/restaurants have been treated as important issues in the keyword network. It has also been shown that the introduction of information technology in the tourism industry is emerging as a recent research trend.