Sustainable Development, Hotels, and Tourism with the perspective of RCN Theory: A Bibliometric Analysis with VOSViewer and Implications for a Future Research Agenda

Abstract

Sustainable development is one of the hot issues discussed by many disciplines including tourism. As this issue should be extremely concern of hotels, many studies have been conducted about these two terms in the literature. However, this study is the first one combining sustainable development, hotels, and tourism with a bibliometric approach. The aim of this study is investigating the interrelationships of these concepts and exploring how these concepts are used together in literature. Moreover, it is aimed to identify bibliometric patterns or trends. To be able to do that, VOSViewer software was used to construct and visualize the bibliometric networks. 314 studies obtained from WOS database were used as a dataset. Some of the metrics and analysis results of WOS were given and Citation of the Sources, Co-occurrence of the Author Keywords, Co-authorship of Countries, Co-authorship of Organizations, Citations of Authors, Bibliographic coupling of countries analysis were run respectively. Seven research questions were answered. Also, it was explained and illustrated how RCN Theory can be used for a better sustainable development in hotel industry and tourism by considering the bibliometric findings which is the added value of this paper. Finally, five suggestions were asserted for a future research agenda.

Keywords

• sustainable development
• hotels
• tourism
• bibliometrics
• vosviewer