Vietnam tourism scholarship, 1995–2025: a comparative bibliometric and codebook-based literature review with implications for higher education

Despite rapid growth in Vietnam tourism scholarship published in internationally indexed journals, its intellectual development and implications for tourism higher education remain insufficiently understood. This study reviews Vietnam tourism scholarship from 1995 to 2025 using a comparative bibliometric and codebook-based approach. Following PRISMA principles, 638 studies from Scopus and Web of Science were analyzed, distinguishing Vietnam-institutional-affiliated scholarship (Corpus A, n = 565) from non-Vietnam-institutional-affiliated scholarship (Corpus F, n = 73). Results indicate substantial growth after 2018 and an increasingly diversified knowledge structure encompassing sustainable tourism, tourist behavior, heritage and cultural tourism, digital tourism, tourism economics, community-based tourism, and workforce development. Corpus A is associated more strongly with quantitative, applied, and locally embedded research, whereas Corpus F contributes more extensively to qualitative, heritage, memory, and development-oriented perspectives. The study proposes a research-to-curriculum framework supporting curriculum design, research methods training, theory-informed teaching, and research capacity development in tourism higher education.