Research trends in film tourism: A bibliometric analysis using the WoS database

Abstract

Although the film tourism literature has grown significantly, no scientific landscape review of the subject has yet been conducted. The current article aims to fill this gap by providing an overview of the film tourism literature through the utilization of bibliometric analysis. To accomplish this objective, the authors utilized a publication dataset on film tourism obtained from the Web of Science database, without applying any publication year criterion. During the compilation of this dataset, certain inclusion criteria were established, such as considering articles published in English and limiting the dataset to articles of the publication type. Consequently, a total of 144 articles focusing on film tourism were included in the sample. The authors conducted the analyses using VOSviewer in December 2022, adhering to the predefined parameters. The first article on film tourism published in WoS was in 2005, and the most articles were published in 2021 (n=17). Upon examining the most cited articles, it was observed that four of them surpassed 150 citations. In terms of authors, it was seen that six authors had more than 200 citations. Four of the top five articles with the highest citations were published in Tourism Management. Australia emerged as the prominent country in the field of film tourism, with Flinders University, an Australian institution, making the most substantial contributions. As a result of the research, some suggestions were presented to the researchers. Future studies may focus on issues such as the effects of the film tourism on local people, destination sustainability, and the potential for new tourism and economic impacts that may occur in the region with film tourism. Furthermore, future bibliometric studies could explore and compare document types and/or film tourism studies acquired from different databases, augmenting the scope of analysis.