KEY TRENDS AND DYNAMICS IN ECOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM DEVELOPMENT: A BIBLIOMETRIC STUDY

The academic literature clearly demonstrates that sustainable tourism development (STD) is no longer a voluntary, simple process that countries should follow. Rather, STD is an absolute necessity to preserve ecology and help communities cope with resource depletion and environmental degradation. For this reason, a Scopus-based bibliometric dataset is used in this study to investigate the intersection of the ecological aspects of sustainable tourism. The present bibliometric study covers the period from 1992 to 2025 (July) and uses VOSviewer software to uncover the underlying patterns of STD publications. Based on a co-occurrence analysis of the keywords, this study shows that sustainable tourism in protected areas is characterized by complex interactions between stakeholders, reflecting underlying power dynamics and governance challenges. The results confirm that economic growth has begun to consider STD in developing countries in a multidisciplinary and intercultural context. Specific methods such as coupling coordination, spatiotemporal analysis and carbon sequestration have become an important scientific field in recent years. In addition, analysis of the most cited papers in the dataset showed that reconceptualizing STD in the context of failed tourism destinations, the transition to a greener economy and the environmental consequences of human actions are quite popular themes used by scholars. The current findings are of great interest to key stakeholders in government, the tourism industry and academia to understand specific dimensions of bibliometric trends in the STD-related literature.