Bibliometric analysis of trends in COVID-19 and tourism

This study investigates the state of research on COVID-19 and tourism through a bibliometric analysis, aiming to identify research lines and gaps, prolific authors, productive countries, most-studied areas, leading journals, and highly cited articles. Motivated by the profound disruptions the COVID-19 pandemic caused to global tourism, the authors sought to map and synthesize the rapidly expanding literature to guide future research and inform policy and practice. Using publications retrieved from Web of Science and visualization via VOSviewer, the study provides a structured overview of topics such as sustainability transitions, tourist risk perception, and policy measures, emphasizing the importance and urgency of understanding tourism’s recovery and transformation during and after the pandemic.

• Data source: Web of Science (WOS) database.
• Search and initial retrieval: Keywords related to COVID-19 and tourism returned 1792 publications.
• Screening and inclusion criteria: A multi-stage filtering process was undertaken to include only publications aiming to study tourism and COVID-19.
  1. Initial cleaning eliminated some records, resulting in 1784 articles.
  2. Title and abstract screening by the authors retained 988 publications relevant to COVID-19 and tourism.
  3. Full-text assessment to ensure inclusion criteria compliance yielded a final dataset of 921 publications.
• Analysis approach: Content analysis of the 921 publications to extract: • Most researched topics (via keyword co-occurrence), • Authors with most publications and co-authorship networks, • Geographical distribution by author affiliations (counting each country once per article even if multiple authors from the same country), • Study areas (global/theoretical vs. area-specific case studies), • Journals with most publications, • Most cited articles and citation distribution.
• Tools: VOSviewer used to build and visualize bibliometric maps (author, journal, keyword) based on co-occurrence data, with clustering to identify thematic groups.
• Keyword mapping: Applied a minimum occurrence threshold of 10; identified 343 keywords grouped into 6 clusters.

• Corpus size and growth: 921 publications analyzed; 304 (2020) and 617 (2021), indicating a strong upward trend.
• Keyword prominence: Most used keywords included “covid” (1605 occurrences), “tourism” (747), “pandemic” (645), “study” (510). Six thematic clusters emerged: (1) infection and measures (quarantine, travel restrictions); (2) perception, risk, travel intention; (3) sustainability, resilience, transformation, crisis management; (4) case studies and tools; (5) economic impacts; (6) hospitality industry, employees, customer satisfaction.
• Authorship: 2633 authors across 921 publications; mean 2.85 authors/article. Articles by 2 authors: 239 (25.95%); 3 authors: 228 (24.75%); single-author: 137 (14.87%); 4+ authors: 317 (34.43%), with 25 papers having ≥10 authors. Most prolific authors: Michael C. Hall (9 articles); Rob Law (8); Jun Wen (8); Hugues Seraphin (8).
• International collaboration and affiliations: 311 articles (33.77%) involved international collaboration; 610 (66.23%) single-country affiliations. Publications linked to 102 countries. Top countries by author primary affiliation: China (147), United States (111), United Kingdom (90), Spain (86), Australia (73).
• Study areas: 509 publications (55.27%) theoretical/conceptual with no specific area; 48 (5.21%) global or multi-country comparisons; 364 (39.52%) case studies. Among case studies, China led with 69 (18.96%), followed by Spain (26) and the United States (21).
• Journals: 921 articles appeared in 276 journals; 181 journals (65.58%) published a single article; 39 (14.13%) published two. Eighteen journals had ≥10 articles. Top journals: Current Issues in Tourism (90; 9.77%), Sustainability (85; 9.23%), Tourism Geographies (35; 3.80%).
• Citations: Total 7515 WOS citations; average 8.16 citations/paper. 402 papers (43.65%) had 0 citations; 116 (12.60%) had 1 citation. Two most-cited 2020 papers: Chinazzi et al. on travel restrictions (1017 WOS citations; 2253 Google Scholar) and Gössling et al. on pandemics and tourism (622 WOS; 1684 Google Scholar).

The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated an unprecedented shock to tourism, prompting swift growth in related research. Keyword clustering reveals a prominent trend reframing the crisis as an opportunity for sustainable transformation of tourism, aligning with climate concerns and UN SDGs. Another major theme is tourist risk perception and its influence on travel intentions, alongside evaluations of containment measures and policies (e.g., distancing, masks, testing, vaccination, health passports). The study identifies gaps and future directions: (1) move beyond mobility restrictions to examine control/freedom policies and potential social consequences (e.g., prejudice affecting migrant labor); (2) translate risk-perception insights into actionable tools for destination managers; (3) assess implications of transitioning away from polluting segments (e.g., cruise tourism) including economic trade-offs; (4) evaluate technological solutions (e.g., service robotization) for technical/security risks, especially data governance; (5) analyze social return on public investments for tourism recovery (e.g., job creation); (6) examine how operational changes (e.g., hotel buffet service shifting to personalized service) affect guest satisfaction and loyalty. The findings underscore that much of the research to date is conceptual, underscoring the need for empirical validation and application. Geographically, China’s leading representation corresponds to the outbreak’s origin and intensive early research; notable absences (e.g., India) suggest opportunities for broader inclusion. Publication patterns show dispersion across many journals but concentration in a few tourism outlets; citation patterns favor early (2020) publications, with a large share of citations concentrated in a few highly cited works. Overall, the mapped themes and gaps can guide targeted, empirically grounded research to support strategic planning and resilient, sustainable tourism recovery.

This bibliometric analysis synthesizes the rapidly expanding literature on COVID-19 and tourism, identifying principal research lines, gaps, leading authors, countries, journals, and highly cited works. Using transparent, replicable procedures, it provides an evidence-based overview to inform future research agendas. The study highlights the field’s predominant conceptual orientation and calls for more empirical applications and interdisciplinary collaboration (e.g., with public health and human rights) to design effective recovery strategies and sustainable transformations in tourism. Strengthening knowledge transfer from research to industry is emphasized to support post-pandemic recovery and adaptation through innovation. Future research should develop managerial tools addressing risk perception, evaluate policy trade-offs and social implications, assess economic impacts of sustainability transitions, examine technological solutions’ risks, appraise social returns on recovery investments, and investigate operational changes’ effects on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

• Database coverage: Reliance on Web of Science means the corpus does not capture all COVID-19 and tourism publications.
• Language: The analysis focused on English-language publications, excluding other languages.
• Quality assessment: The rapid growth in publications underscores the need for quality appraisal; this study did not systematically assess methodological quality beyond inclusion criteria.
• Temporal citation bias: Earlier (2020) publications have had more time to accrue citations, influencing citation-based indicators.