Bibliometric analysis on wellness tourism – citation and co-citation analysis

Abstract

Purpose Tourism on wellness is a rapidly expanding segment of the travel industry; nevertheless, it is still in its infancy, and more study research is needed to develop a scientific foundation for health and wellness tourism. The study uses bibliometric indicators like as citations to determine the field structure on wellness tourism from 1998 to 2021, and the VOSviewer software to map the significant trends in wellness tourism (WT) area, to examine the present situation. Design/methodology/approach To reach this objective, the theme of “wellness tourism” was searched in the “Scopus” database, and bibliometrics data on the publications were obtained. In total, 414 papers were found during the initial search, which was then narrowed according to the criteria. Using this strategy, the author discovered 386 records, and after removing 4 duplicates and 1 irrelevant document, the refining produced 381 related documents. The most-cited papers, significant authors, co-citation of references, sources and authors were all investigated for the publications related to WT. Findings According to this report, research into wellness tourism has increased in recent years. The authors discovered two papers with over 238 “Scopus” citations and a total of 10 studies with 1414 citations. According to Scopus, the document Napier et al. receives 36.5% of citations each year. There were a total of 804 authors who published about WT between 1998 and 2021, with Smith, M, Voigt, c, and Puczkó, L being the most-cited reference authors in the subject. Han h. has the highest index of 56 of all the authors. Research limitations/implications The “Scopus” database was used for bibliometric analysis, although the VOSviewer was used exclusively. This considered as a first study to utilize a bibliometric method to address this research gap, identifying the tools, journals, and, most crucially, conceptual subdomains like spa, yoga, therapy, spirituality and trekking that will be significant in future research. Originality/value Using a bibliometric analytic approach, this article looked at papers on wellness tourism published between 1998 and 2021. Thus, its goal is to learn more about wellness tourism and to enlighten wellness tourism scholars on the field's structure.