Agritourism: A Bibliometric Insight into Sustainability and Rural Development

Agritourism has increasingly attracted scholarly interest due to its potential to foster sustainable rural development.However, related studies are scattered and lack coverage of study trends and topics.The study focuses on the analysis of the keyword trends and structures of topics in the field with the help of Scopus and Web of Science data.A total of 826 peerreviewed articles were analyzed, demonstrating that each article had an average of 14.4 citations, an annual publication growth rate of 17.29%, and an international co-authorship rate of 9.09% over time.Bibliometrix (R package) was used to conduct keyword co-occurrence analysis, co-authorship network, and thematic evolution mapping.These findings show that four thematic clusters are outlined, such as sustainable development and rural spaces, ecosystems and agriculture, governance and policy frameworks, and visitor experience and marketing.These groupings include important areas of rural tourism, conservation of biodiversity, response to climate change, agricultural policy, innovation in rural development and cultural experiences of the visitors.Furthermore, co-authorship analysis highlighted important clusters of international collaboration, with Italy (103 articles, 2848 citations) and China (175 articles, 2664 citations) emerging as the leading contributors.The analysis of the evolution of the topic shows that the research on agritourism has gradually shifted from traditional topics such as rural tourism and sustainable development to emerging topics such as circular economy, social innovation and public health.The results provided a landscape of agritourism, the interdisciplinary and international cooperation aspects, gaps and research opportunities on long-term tourism development.