Research trends in tourism and hospitality from 1991 to 2020: an integrated approach of corpus linguistics and bibliometrics

Purpose This study aims to track the historical development in tourism and hospitality research over the past 30 years by applying a novel interdisciplinary approach, combining both corpus linguistics and bibliometric analysis. Design/methodology/approach Most frequently discussed topics and newly emerging topics were identified by investigating 18,266 abstracts from 18 leading tourism and hospitality journals with corpus linguistics toolkit AntConc and natural language processing (NLP) tool spaCy. Trend analysis and bibliometric methods were used to determine the longitudinal changes of research topics, most highly-cited publications and authors' production. Findings This study revealed the evolution patterns of the identified 576 most frequently discussed topics across the four subperiods (1991–2000, 2001–2010, 2011–2015 and 2016–2020). Specifically, results showed that information technology-related topics account for the largest proportion of the identified 38 newly emerging topics from 2011. Besides, researchers are increasingly focusing on the use of more sophisticated and advanced statistical methodologies. Practical implications This study helps researchers make sensible decisions on what research topics to explore; it also helps practitioners and stakeholders make the shift and track opportunities in the field. Originality/value No other studies have employed the novel interdisciplinary approach, combining corpus linguistic tools in linguistics, NLP techniques in computer science and bibliometric analysis in library and information science, for exploring research trends in tourism and hospitality.