چكيده لاتين :
Social media plays an important role in tourism, especially in
information retrieval, decision making, tourism promotion, and
customer interaction. Due to the growing number of published
researches in social media and tourism, this research aims to analyze
the publication trend and conduct a bibliometric analysis of the study
published in this field. This study shows that the use of social media in
various sectors of tourism has increased in recent years. The researchers
and practitioners can benefit from these results to identify popular and
new research areas.
Introduction
social media is one of the most effective communication processes
whose origins can be traced back to different sciences. One of the most
important industries directly affected by social media is the hospitality
industry and its subsidiaries, because, in the service industry, especially
the hospitality sector, humans as customers or users are the most
important factor in determining the success of a business. For this
reason, research variety has been conducted on the role of the hospitality and tourism industry's social media megatrend; It is shown
that social media's impact on the tourism industry is very broad.
Therefore, the importance of a comprehensive and integrated review of
past research is increased. Much research has been done to review the
related literature at different periods, focusing on social media, the
Internet, and its role in the hospitality and tourism industry. Although
qualitative literature reviews increase our understanding of the research
process, they have common limitations. For example, these reviews
have limited coverage. They are highly dependent on the mental
judgments and prejudices of the researcher, they are time-consuming,
and they cannot analyze the relationships of authors, regions,
institutions, and keywords. However, structured quantitative methods
can overcome these limitations and provide a comprehensive and
objective picture of the body of knowledge. Therefore, this study will
use bibliometric analysis to review published social media research in
tourism between 2009 and 2020.
Materials and Methods
In this research, a bibliometric analysis is used to investigate research
trends in the role of social media in tourism. The information of 1054
articles published in the Web of Science from 2009 to 2020 is analyzed.
VOSViewer software is used to analyze and illustrate the results: First,
the publication trend and the impact of authors, journals, and articles
are examined; Then, the structure of the co-occurrence network of
keywords and the co-authorship network of authors, institutions, and
countries are analyzed; Finally, the content of the research is analyzed
using an LDA topic modeling algorithm. Discussion and Results
Research shows that research on the role of social media in tourism has
grown significantly in recent years, with most articles published in
2019. It is predicted that this growth will continue in the future.
According to the results, keywords such as word-of-mouth, behavior,
models, impacts, and information have been widely used in this area.
However, keywords such as classification, posts, tourism experiences,
social media analysis, and evolution have been used more recently. Among the authors, Law, Buhalis, and Gretzel are the top three
productive authors. Also, Xiang, Gretzel, and Buhalis are the top three
most well-known authors. According to the results, Tourism
Management, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality
Management, and Sustainability are the most productive journals. Also,
Tourism Management, Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, and
International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management have
the highest number of citations. (Xiang & Gretzel, 2010), (Leung, Law,
Van Hoof, & Buhalis, 2013), and (Munar & Jacobsen, 2014) are the top
three influential documents in this field. Among the authors, Law,
Chung, and Li are the top three collaborative authors. The Hong Kong
Polytechnic University is the most collaborative institute, followed by
Deakin University and Malaga University. England is the most
collaborative country, followed by the USA and the People's Republic
of China.
Conclusions
This study presents a descriptive review of the research on the role of
social media in tourism. Given that, many articles have been published
in recent years, each of which has addressed this issue from different
angles. This research can help researchers and practitioners identify
existing trends, understand the research structure, identify new topics,
analyze the relationship between thematic areas, and analyze the
structure of collaboration between researchers.
