Bibliometric Analysis of Literature on Religious Tourism in Web of Science

Abstract

This study aims to assess current trends in religious tourism research utilizing bibliometric approaches and associated materials published between 1992 and 2022. The other three objectives of the study are to describe interesting research topics in religious tourism, to show the advancement of understanding in this area of research, and to identify the essential features of religious tourism studies. The Web of Science bibliographic database is used to collect bibliographic data on religious tourism. After various bibliometric indicators have been summarized, “citation analysis, co-citation analysis, and keyword co-occurrence analysis” are used to establish the relationships between “keywords”, “documents”, “authors”, “sources”, and “countries”. VOSviewer is used to display the results as network maps (version 1.6.18). As a result of the study, it was determined that religious tourism research focused around four main themes such as sustainable development and location, religious tourism, tourism and culture, and religious places and entrepreneurs, and these themes reached the highest number of publications especially in 2019. In addition, it was concluded that the most cited studies were done by Rinschede (1992), Blackwell (2007) and Shinde (2010) and that the most influential journal on religious tourism is Annals of Tourism Research and Turkey is the most cited country.