Safety and security research in tourism: a bibliometric mapping

Abstract

Safety and security are among the most basic needs in life and are essential in tourism as in other research areas; thus, researchers need to focus on the topic. Since the 1970s, when the first scientific paper on tourism safety was published, the number of research in this field has significantly increased. This study aims to carry out a bibliometric analysis on tourism safety and security research conducted over the past forty-five years. The literature on the subject includes 597 studies obtained from the Scopus database. VOSviewer scientific mapping software programme was used to perform the analysis. The software covers keywords of tourism safety and security topics, influential authors, publications, journals, and countries and identifies several techniques such as co-citation, concept association, and bibliographic coupling. The rapid increase in the number of research and citations shows that the topic of tourism safety and security has drawn the attention of researchers in the last 12 years. The analysis results revealed that the study with the strongest link with other publications is “Tourist's perceptions of safety and security while visiting Cape Town”. The researcher who contributed the most to the field with the author citation is Michael C. Hall; the journal making the most substantial impact is Tourism Management. Finally, the most productive country is United States of America. The current study contributes to expanding the literature on tourism safety and security and offers an overview for further research in this field.