Smart Tourism Research Landscape 2019 - 2024: Bibliometric Insights On Trends, Collaboration, And Sustainability

Abstract

Smart tourism has become a central issue in the transformation of modern tourism, thus bibliometric mapping is necessary to understand the direction, trends, and contributions of research in this field. Using a bibliometric approach, this study aims to map smart tourism research trends for 2019-2024, thereby providing a more comprehensive understanding of the direction of development, academic contributions, and potential for further research in this field. This study used a quantitative approach by analyzing scientific publication data on smart tourism obtained from the Scopus database, and the results were visualized using VOSviewer. A total of 627 documents were analyzed, producing five major thematic clusters. The most frequent keywords identified include “smart tourism”, “IoT”, “big data”, “AI”, and “social media” indicating a strong emphasis on technology-oriented research themes. The results show several key findings. First, publications on smart tourism showed a consistent upward trajectory during 2019-2024. In the early years (2019-2020), growth was moderate, while the slight decline in 2021 could be attributed to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which temporarily disrupted research productivity. Nevertheless, a sharp surge began in 2022 and peaked in 2024 with more than 130 publications. Second, the main countries contributing to smart tourism research are China, Spain, and South Korea. Third, the keyword network visualization reveals that global smart tourism research is dominated by technology-driven themes like IoT, data analytics, and AI. In contrast, areas such as tourist behavior and social media represent the human dimension, while the marginalization of heritage, rural, and sustainability tourism highlights underexplored opportunities for more inclusive and  sustainable development. The novelty of this study lies in mapping smart rural tourism and smart heritage tourism as under-explored domains within digital tourism, which have received limited attention in prior bibliometric studies that predominantly focused on technology-driven or urban-centered themes of smart tourism. These findings expand the theoretical scope beyond urban-focused smart tourism and open new directions for future research and practice. This study suggests that policymakers should integrate smart technologies, foster international research collaboration, and position smart tourism as a strategic framework to achieve sustainable, inclusive, and innovation-driven tourism development