Application of necessary condition analysis in tourism research: A review of trends and future prospects

This paper aims to discuss the increasing application of Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) in the context of tourism studies. Although NCA has gained increasing attention among tourism scholars, a comprehensive understanding of how NCA has evolved within the field is still limited. This study addresses this gap by providing the first systematic review of NCA-based tourism research using the SPAR-4-SLR framework. Drawing on publications indexed in the Scopus and Web of Science databases, the study combines performance analysis and science mapping techniques to examine the intellectual structure, thematic evolution and methodological development of NCA in tourism research. The findings identify the most influential authors, institutions and journals, while identifying nine major knowledge clusters that characterize the current research landscape. These clusters highlight the growing application of NCA in areas such as sustainability, destination development, tourist behaviour, digital trust, crisis management and methodological integration with complementary approaches such as fsQCA and SEM. The study also provides some suggestions for future research based on the themes identified in the knowledge clusters. Collectively, this review serves as a great resource for gaining a comprehensive overview of the current advancements and promising avenues for future research in predicting business occurrences using Necessary Condition Analysis.