Over the past three decades, tourism has grown rapidly worldwide, gradually increasing the competition among tourism destinations. Coupled with the impact of COVID-19, Malaysia, as one of the countries in the Asia-Pacific region most affected by the epidemic, is in urgent need to adjust policies and measures to cope with fierce competition and quickly restore tourism. The aim of this article is thus to analyse the existing related research and concludes the research trend and limitations. Based on the articles collected on Scopus and Google Scholar, this study used a combination of Excel software and VOSviwer software, which applying technical tools including statistic and co-keyword analysis. There are 33 articles meeting inclusion criteria used to conduct a bibliometric review of existing articles researched on tourism destination competitiveness of Malaysia in the last decade since 2012. The results show that previous studies focus on the destination competitiveness of rural tourism and eco-tourism, but few studies on the comparison of tourism competition between Malaysia and other countries,which is insufficient on the comparison international tourism competition. Furthermore, discussion and recommendations for future studies are made in the discussion and recommendations. This article, on the one hand, provides a knowledge support for filling the gap in the literature review of the competitiveness of tourism destinations in Malaysia. On the other hand, it offers a practical background for helping the Malaysian government to adjust the implementation of policies and gain the advantages of tourism competition, to cope with the complexity and uncertainties in the future.
Wu et al. (Sun,) studied this question.