Forty years of the rural tourism research: reviewing the trend, pattern and future agenda

ABSTRACT

Rural tourism has been a key research area over the last few decades. However, evaluating the advancement of its dimensions as a systematic and comprehensive audit was long overdue. This study performed a bibliometric analysis on 404 articles from 1980 to 2019 and revealed that rural tourism has maximum growth in the last two decades. Deductive and quantitative methods are the principally implemented theoretical and methodical approaches, respectively. The developed countries have majorly contributed from 1980 to 1999, while the last two decades the developing nations have contributed. The rural tourism research in the developed world has matured by debating critical issues such as community politics, power struggle, resource control, whereas these issues along with several new issues, such as climate change and epidemic, have ample scope in future especially in the context of Eastern World. This study offers an insight into the evolution of conceptual framework, authorship, institution-specific productivity, spatial distribution of study areas, crucial themes, and the future research directions. The present findings will work as a comprehensive reference to the potential research dimensions and add to the existing knowledge body of the tourism research in general and the rural tourism research in particular.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural tourism
• bibliometric research
• textual analysis
• community politics
• systematic review
• rural tourism research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.c

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Arunima Karali

Arunima Karali received her Master’s in Geography from Presidency University, Kolkata, India. She is currently pursuing her doctoral research in revealing the structural components of rural tourism operations from Presidency University, Kolkata. She is primarily interested in exploring the dimensions of rural tourism, especially resource distribution, community politics and power struggle of actors in tourism.

Subhajit Das

Subhajit Das is presently working as an Assistant Professor of Geography at Presidency University, Kolkata, India. Having been trained in Geography of Tourism, his research interest revolves around community development issues in specific and the tourism issues at rural destinations of India. His major works in association with the leading tourism researchers in the world include prospects of Indian tourism, pilgrimage and walkability, community participation in disaster preparedness at LDC’s destinations.

Hiran Roy

Hiran Roy is a Lecturer of International School of Hospitality, Sports, and Tourism Management at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Vancouver, Canada. He holds a Ph.D. in Management from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. His research interests include sustainable tourism, destination management, sustainable local-food systems, city-branding through food, hospitality luxury branding and sustainability. Hiran’s work has been published in various prestigious and leading academic journals such as Journal of Sustainable Tourism.