Tourism and mobile devices: provenance of academic research through a bibliometric study

Abstract


 Purpose
 
 This paper aims to outline a map of all the research that exists on mobile technology and tourism archived in the two main databases worldwide (Web of Science and Scopus). Accordingly, with the identification of all the scientific articles that deal with both mobile technology and tourism, the authors seek to ascertain the evolution of mobile technology in the tourism sector through the years, countries, universities and authors and determine the various collaborations brought about between authors, universities, institutions and/or companies in various research projects. Finally, it also allows the authors to distinguish the main topics under study within the scope of ‘mobile tourism’.
 
 
 
 Design/methodology/approach
 
 A mixed methodology has been carried out. The search focused on the principal databases of bibliographic references and citations of periodical publications, such as articles from scientific journals, books and other types of printed material. Once the results were obtained in the respective databases, it was necessary to be able to work with them. In this respect, the authors had to extract the relevant data and dump it in a bibliographic reference manager, for which they chose Mendeley. After this, the tabulation of data was performed in Excel and tables and graphs were created from all the data collected.
 
 
 
 Findings
 
 The main results obtained and analyzed are the number of articles per year, countries and universities. In the same way, it is interesting to highlight the number of countries and universities that participate in each article under study. On the other hand, an analysis has been carried out regarding the number of articles per author, as well as the topics dealt with in the different articles.
 
 
 
 Originality/value
 
 This analysis reveals the role that has been played by mobile phones in tourism since the first scientific article was recorded in 2002. In this regard, in recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of articles, finally resulting in moderate figures in relation to countries (40) and universities (233) that have formed part of the subject matter under study. In contrast to other areas of research in tourism, the relevance of this subject is therefore evident, as is the need for greater background knowledge to establish research models adapted to the new reality of tourism in a world of ever-increasing mobility.
 

Decoding the Trends and the Emerging Research Directions of Digital Tourism in the Last Three Decades: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…To validate our research topic on “digital tourism,” we screened databases to check the exclusivity of this topic. We found bibliometric studies related to the use of new data analysis techniques (Palomoa et al, 2017), mobile devices (Ortega-Fraile et al, 2018), mobile technology (Chen et al, 2020), social media (Mehraliyev et al, 2019; Nusair et al, 2019), and innovation (Corte et al, 2019; Durán-Sánchez et al, 2019) in tourism. We also observed articles related to sustainability (Serrano et al, 2019) and smart tourism (Bastidas-Manzano et al, 2021).…”

“…Palomoa et al (2017), presented how tourism research is making use of new data techniques like structural equation modeling, big data, and data mining over two decades. On the other hand, few studies determined the evolution of mobile technologies in the tourism industry over the years (Chen et al, 2020; Ortega-Fraile et al, 2018). We found studies related to social media in tourism and hospitality where researchers presented the social structure of collaborative networks (Mehraliyev et al, 2019) or systematic literature review (Nusair et al, 2019).…”

“…Many scientific articles related to digitalization in tourism have been published and disseminated over time. They are focusing on new data analysis techniques (Palomoa et al, 2017), mobile devices (Ortega-Fraile et al, 2018) social media (Mehraliyev et al, 2019), mobile technology (Chen et al, 2020), and innovation (Durán-Sánchez et al, 2019) in tourism.…”