Sustainability and Competitiveness in the Tourism Industry and Tourist Destinations: A Bibliometric Study

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the state of the art on the relationship between tourism, sustainability and competitiveness (TSC); moreover, the analysis also includes a focus on tourism destination (TSCD). To that end, information on the publications in these fields from recent years was sourced from the Web of Science database. In addition, the VOSviewer software program was used to enable a more in-depth bibliometric study, allowing the results to be clustered by authors, institutions, countries, and journals. The study carried out revealed that 808 articles have been published on aspects relating to TCS and 409 regarding TSCD. The results obtained underscore the greater scientific output on aspects related to sustainability than on aspects related to competitiveness and also that there has been a significant and exponential increase in both cases in recent years. These three fields of study (tourism, sustainability and competitiveness) are rarely combined in the literature, highlighting the lack of a comprehensive overview of this trinity. The evidence reported here suggest that the trend identified represents a future line of work for the coming years.