Exploring the tourism, neuro-tourism, and hospitality Nexus: a comprehensive bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Despite the considerable attention toward tourism and hospitality, neuro-tourism remains largely unexplored within academic investigations. This study is designed to provide bibliometric analysis in tourism, neuro-tourism, and hospitality research using VOSviewer to fill the gap. We followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework to select relevant papers on the Scopus database between January 2009 and July 2023. Analyzing 971 papers revealed that the UK is the top country in publication (289 papers and 11,391 citations), while Italy was the lowest country on the list (42 papers and 4651 citations). Buhalis, D., was identified as the most influential author, with 18 papers and the highest-cited papers (1833 citations). Furthermore, the strongest pair authors correlation was between Okumus, F. and Rahimi, R., with 468 links, highlighting a significant degree of connection between their respective references. Keywords related to tourism, neuro-tourism, and hospitality include "halal tourism," "urban tourism," "rural tourism," "food tourism," "Islamic hospitality," "hospitality ecosystem," and "neuroscience." “International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management” was the most productive journal (96 papers and 4,312 citations). Furthermore, this journal published the most-cited paper, "An assessment of the use of partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) in hospitality research,” with 687 citations. This is the first study to conduct the bibliometric analysis of tourism, neuro-tourism, and hospitality research; therefore, it will lead to more publications on related subjects by directing the researchers to less studied fields such as neuro-tourism. Additionally, scholarly collaborations may improve the depth of this research.