A Bibliometric Analysis of the Carbon Footprint Studies in Tourism

In recent years, carbon footprint (CF) has been studied as an important research topic. Increasing the number of CF studies is important for reducing the environmental impact of tourism and raising awareness on sustainable tourism. This study examines the number of studies on CF in tourism, investigates the connections between authors, institutions, resources, and countries, and explores the dominant key issues in the studies. “Carbon footprint” and “tourism” keywords were used to identify studies that take place together in all fields. A total of 393 studies published between 2007 and 2024 were identified using the Web of Science Core Collection, and VOSviewer was used to analyze the co-authorship, co-occurrence, citation, bibliographic coupling, co-citation networks, and themes. According to the findings, researches on CF in tourism have increased, especially after 2018. The University of Queensland, Bournemouth University, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have the highest numbers of papers on CF in tourism. Moreover, according to the countries of affiliation and the most cited authors, Australia was the most dominant country. On the other hand, Sustainability, Journal of Cleaner Production, and Journal of Sustainable Tourism have the highest number of CF studies in tourism.