A Visual Analysis Comparing the Research Progress of Adventure Tourism in China and Abroad during the Last 20 Years

Adventure tourism is a new industry that integrates sports and tourism. A systematic comparison of domestic and foreign research progress is valuable for understanding the current research situation in China, grasping the latest forms abroad, and guiding the next research direction. Based on the core databases of “China Knowledge Network Database” and “Web of Science”, and the period of 2000–2021 as the time span, CiteSpace V and ArcGIS software were used to compare the research progress of adventure tourism in China and worldwide. (1) The quantity and quality of domestic literature in the field of adventure tourism lag behind the literature from foreign countries. (2) Compared with foreign research scholars, who mainly work in teams of two or three, the number of large research teams in China is larger and they are widely distributed. (3) Compared with foreign research institutions, which are mainly universities concentrated in Europe and North America and have strong inter-institutional ties, China's research institutions are mainly universities concentrated in Beijing, the Yangtze River Delta, and the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, but their inter-institutional ties are weak. (4) In terms of research themes, compared with the diffusion model centered on such keywords as “adventure tourism”, “tourism”, “behavior” and “risk”, the research in China presents a characteristic with “adventure tourism” as the center and the other keywords are more diffused. (5) Foreign studies often focus on the environmental impact of adventure tourism activities and environmental protection, while domestic studies tend to focus on the experience and satisfaction of adventure tourists. Accordingly, we propose that the domestic research system of adventure tourism should be improved by constructing a scientific adventure tourism theoretical system, strengthening the cross-disciplinary research of adventure tourism, strengthening the weak research areas, broadening the research population and research area, and paying more attention to research on adventure tourism that is centered on project tourism.