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Tourism knowledge domain has always been one of the appealing topics in tourism academic circle. This paper extracted author-selected keywords from 4788 articles published from 2012 to 2021 in four authoritative journals: Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management, Journal of Sustainable Tourism and Tourism Tribune. These keywords were coded according to “research areas”, “research objects”, “research methods”, and “research disciplines”, and a statistical analysis was carried out regarding the frequency, quantity, average frequency, and frequency variance of each category of the keywords. A total of 3459 Chinese keywords and 9128 English keywords formed the basis of this analysis. According to the findings, China is the most frequently studied geographical region in the international tourism research. The application of qualitative methods in the Chinese tourism research is less frequent than that in the international research, and the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods has become an important trend in tourism research. The international tourism research on certain topics is more in-depth and cutting-edge than the Chinese tourism research.
Su et al. (Tue,) studied this question.