A bibliometric analysis of sustainable tourism research in India

The present paper examines how the research related to sustainability in the broader field of tourism has evolved overtime in context to India. The research is undertaken by analysing Scopus data to identify the trends in publications. The paper highlights significant journals and authors and determines important themes in the field. The paper uses citation and keyword analysis on an aggregated corpus. The findings of the study indicate that there is a substantial increase in research on this subject. The analysis identifies four key areas of research (1) Sustainable tourism and Eco-tourism, (2) Cultural and Heritage tourism, (3) Inclusion of local communities and livelihoods (Rural tourism), and (4) Religious tourism. A key observation suggests a thematic tendency where the research on religious tourism primarily reports the problems of overcrowding and environmental degradation, whereas leisure tourism studies tends to underline solutions like community-based sustainable tourism as an answer to the problem of sustainability. The research recommends that the findings across these diverse themes should be more closely integrated in the future as the two although may not seem but are closely related and even overlapping. It is also required to evaluate the long-term impacts of the policies. Furthermore, the role of new technologies needs to be investigated by the researchers and plan in a way so that the focus on climate resilience is not lost.