Trends in sustainable tourism paradigm

In recent decades, sustainable tourism has emerged as a central paradigm, attracting growing scholarly interest. External factors, such as the SDGs, climate change agendas, smart and digitalized tourism, cyber and astronaut travel, pandemics, and shifting trends in economic competitiveness, mass tourism, and overtourism, are shaping the 21st-century paradigmatic landscape, challenging both the theoretical “what” and practical “how” of the sustainable tourism paradigm. Using Kuhn’s paradigmatic framework and the Web of Science bibliometric database from 1991 to 2022, this analysis traces trends in sustainable tourism research, advances in academic communication through influential co-citation networks and interdisciplinarity, and the emergence of alternative and quasi-paradigms. The findings suggest, first, a positive trend in tourism scholarly research production