Tourist Guiding From Past to Present: A Bibliometric Analysis

The aim of this study is to conduct a bibliometric analysis of tourist guiding studies published in Web of Science (WoS) indexed journals in the half-century period covering the years 1975-2025. For this purpose, 2574 articles accessed from the Web of Science database on March 3, 2025 using scientific inclusion and exclusion criteria were used in the document review technique included in qualitative research methods. The data obtained by scanning the subject area and keywords of “tourist guiding” were analyzed with the VOSviewer program. According to the findings; it has been determined that the number of studies on tourist guiding in the field of tourism has increased in recent years, the subject is frequently written by researchers, and is published in high-impact journals. The researchers who contributed the most are; Carvache-Franco M., Carvache-Franco W., Carvache-Franco O., Pearce PL., Zhang Y. In addition, among the 120 countries that provide support to the field of tourist guiding; China ranked first with 354 studies, the USA ranked second with 347 studies, and Spain ranked third with 321 studies. Among the organizations that contributed the most in terms of funding, the National Natural Science Foundation of China ranks first by a large margin (104). The study is one of the first attempts to comprehensively examine and visually map international tourism studies related to tourist guiding with network analysis. At the end of the study, theoretical and practical suggestions are presented.