A novel approach to identify research fronts of tourism literature

This study applies a novel approach to identify the research fronts of literature in tourism over the past decades. A research front is a coherent topic addressed by a group of researchers in recent years. It is difficult to adopt any traditional methodology to explore the research fronts of tourism literature due to the large amount of data. We retrieve tourism articles over the period 1977 to 2013 from ISI Web of Science database and acquire 8799 articles for analysis. A citation network based edge-betweenness clustering approach is applied to group the tourism literature and then a key-route main path analysis is used to identify the influential articles of each group. The keywords of all articles in each group and the major topics of the articles on the key-route main path are integrated to figure out the research focus. Five groups with more than 400 articles each are reported and the major topics of each group are `tourism sustainability´, `tourism destination choice´, `sociology of tourism´, `tourism demand forecasting´, and `climate change´. The methodology presented in this study is a good means for identifying the research fronts of tourism literature. We believe that it is also applicable to other scientific or technological fields.