The Evolution of Tourism research: a new knowledge platform?

By analysing Annals of Tourism Research subject index, this study aims to draw conclusions about the evolution/trends of tourism research. Because of Annals’s reputation as the leading international scholarly journal in the field, and also because of its consistent and comprehensive subject index, it was possible to create a database that allowed to observe the evolution of the field between 1973 and 2002. From the identification of the core subject themes, and through a dimension reduction process, the use of the BiPlot methodology allowed us to identify the most relevant subject themes, which show the main research trends between 1973 and 2002. The results of this study are consistent with previous studies and the observed trends in subjects revealed a relatively close match to Jafari’s (2001) four platforms as an emergent paradigm for tourism knowledge. For future research similar analyses including not only other tourism journals but also a bigger number of subject themes are needed, to expand the findings to the field as a whole.