A Bibliometric Analysis of Tourists’ Digital Footprint Research by VOSviewer

The topic of tourists’ digital footprint has attracted considerable attention in the last two decades as information and communication technology have evolved. The popularity of this topic is mainly due to the high quality of the data, the accessibility of collecting data, and the novelty of cutting edge analysis tools. While numerous studies have been published on tourists' digital footprints, research that classifies the scholarly output using bibliometric and network analysis remains limited. This work aims to provide insights into this topic using a bibliometric analysis with VOSviewer. In total, 321 papers have been retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database. In this work, descriptive and bibliometric analyses are presented. Descriptive analysis shows that academic yields have been increasing from 2008 to 2022, particularly after 2015, when the data entered a period of growth, as well as indications for major categories and journals. In addition, a bibliographic analysis of keywords identified that the current topical focus is primarily on tourist flows and their patterns based on social media. A bibliographic analysis of countries and institutions indicated that China is the most prolific country; however, Singapore is the most influential country in this domain. In addition, the findings are confirmed by the bibliometric analysis of cocitation and coupling networks. This work provides insight into the research network and identifies research opportunities for tourists’ digital footprint.