30 Years of Research in Tourism: Insights from a Probabilistic Topic-Modeling Literature Analysis

This study aims to explore the topical growth, patterns, and trends of importance in tourism research over the past three decades (1990–2019). By leveraging a large corpus of 18,725 abstracts from 20 leading tourism journals, we employ latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to identify, quantify, and semantically interpret the predominant research themes and their evolution within the tourism discipline. The analysis reveals topic distributions across journals, highlighting focused areas as well as diverse topic coverage. Temporal analyses uncover the changes in the popularity of different topics, shedding light on emerging areas –topics that have gained increasing scholarly attention over recent years, indicating their growing significance and influence in the field of tourism research. The study reveals that while certain topics, such as consumer experience, digital innovation, risk behaviors, sustainability, and social media, have drawn more attention recently, others, such as marketing communication and e-tourism, have cooled down over time. Journal-level insights suggest that Visitor Studies and Event Management focus on themes related to visitor engagement and event tourism, whereas journals such as Tourism Economics and Tourism Management continue to emphasize economic growth and demand forecasting. The study provides valuable insights into the research landscape and offers implications for scholars, journal editors, and practitioners. It highlights the importance of fostering collaboration to address future challenges in the multidisciplinary tourism field.