Tourism research is an academic field or a multidisciplinary subject, a systematic literature review on theoretical development in tourism research

Abstract

The relatively short history of tourism research is characterized by an ongoing debate on whether tourism is an independent academic field or an independent field of research with sole characteristics. In scientific research, tourism has been approached by different disciplines using different theoretical backgrounds and methods. That could conclude that tourism, lacking its theory and method, is merely a research object. This study is formulating the overall theoretical development of tourism research. For this purpose, two reputed databases, web of science and Scopus, are select to review the literature. Quality assessment criteria of inclusion and exclusion are followed by PRISMA statement 2015 for better results. The final 47 studies are selected after the comprehensive process. The classification of literature is a critical phase, and theories are used in tourism research are discussed in detail, and social exchange theory, theory of planned behavior, and tourism theories are more commonly discussed in the literature. The bibliometric analysis is done to find the collaborations on citations and co-occurrence of the author's keyword in the literature used. Finally, the study's findings show that tourism research is about the theories that are the focus of the literature. The surfacing of the literature is strongly recommended that the tourism research is individual discipline.