Four decades of sustainable tourism research: Trends and future research directions

Abstract

AbstractWith the growth of sustainable tourism research and its practical relevance in today's world, it is important to integrate and synthesize the vast amount ofintellectual work on this topic. This research applies a novel and robust structural topic modeling technique to analyze textual data from a total of 3289 research articles on sustainable tourism published between 1978 and 2022. The topics identified have been classified into macro, meso, and micro levels. Further, we compared and contrasted research themes across three time periods to provide a coherent, cohesive, and holistic overview of the extant literature in each period and discuss their contributions to knowledge. This article presents the publication trends, research evolution in the last four decades, and identifies emerging topics and future research opportunities to advance knowledge.