A View on Research Panorama of Spiritual Tourism: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Spiritual tourism infuses mindfulness and spirituality into the fabric of travel. The main objective of this research is to pinpoint the status quo on the research panorama of spiritual tourism. Furthermore, this study assesses how far spirituality-based research has progressed in tourism. This study employs a bibliometric approach to analyze 174 research papers extracted from the Scopus database from the year 2005 to 2022. The research molded the obtained informational structure in the form of publication years, publication sources, prolific authors and their locations, the main keywords, and most cited research papers. Additionally, co-authorship, inter-country co-authorship, and keywords co-occurrences network maps in the field of research on spiritual tourism were created with the aid of VOSviewer software. It has been found that spiritual tourism is an attracting and growing topic for researchers working in the tourism sector. The most cited paper is “Spiritual journey to Hajj: Australian and Pakistani experience and expectations” (Haq & Jackson, 2009) with 66 citations. The most productive author is Farooq Haq from Canadian University Dubai. Canadian University, Dubai, and Central Queensland University, Australia, generated the most papers. The “International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage” (n=20) published the most spiritual tourism-themed research papers.

Keywords

• bibliometric analysis
• spiritualism
• vosviewer
• scopus
• tourism