Exploring the knowledge structure and potential research areas of sustainable tourism in sustainable development: Based on text mining and semantic network analysis

The concept of sustainable tourism development is derived from sustainable development. Building tourism with the framework of sustainable development has become a necessary effective way. This study examined the abstracts and titles of 1783 sustainable development and 692 sustainable tourism development related papers from 2012 to 2021 as textual data sources through the Web of Science core database. Using text mining and semantic network as analysis methods, this paper summarizes eight main clusters of sustainable development and sustainable tourism development in the past 10 years. Based on this, this paper compares the differences between the two researches and explores four potential research areas in sustainable tourism development: (1) threats to sustainability; (2) ecology and health; (3) stakeholder cooperation and roles; and (4) tourism development planning. In addition, the visual network knowledge structure intuitively captures the relationship between the different keywords in the clustering, which provides an important reference value for broadening the future research direction of sustainable tourism development.