Review of Tourism Responsibility Literature and Sustainable Tourism Visualised Using CiteSpace

Since the concept of sustainable development was introduced in the 1980s, there has been a rapid increase in the literature on sustainable development in tourism.Responsible tourism has become a sustainable development practice, and the related literature has developed rapidly.Tourists are recognised as the central actors responsible for responsible tourism; however, there is a lack of research on responsible tourism.To determine the current state of research in Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) database, this study conducted a series of content analyses using CiteSpace and examined network structure maps between publications, including the distribution of core authors and institutions, and high-frequency categories; the contribution of the number of articles by country; the number of highly cited papers and research hotspots; as well as the analysis of co-authorship relationships, the analysis of co-occurrence of keywords, and the clustering analysis and emergence analysis.This study focuses on Responsible Tourist (RT) research in SSCI in a scientometric way and draws the following findings.First, the contributing authors of articles in RT research are mainly from China, the United States, Australia and South Korea.Second, existing research in RT research focuses on (tourism) business and economics, environmental science, and public administration.Third, new trends in RT research have shifted from the relationship between tourists and responsible tourism and the factors influencing tourists' environmentally accountable behaviour to the motivations of responsible tourists at the micro level.In the context of emission reduction targets, post-pandemic tourism recovery, tourism's guidance and demand response to tourist behaviour may define new research frontiers in RT research.