Abstract

"Mapping the History of Scholarship on Sport Tourism (1989-2023): A Bibliometric Review"

Jiyoon An, Fayetteville State University, NC, USA (drjiyoonan@gmail.com)

"Sport tourism is defined as sport-based travel away from the home environment for a limited time, where sport is characterized by a unique set of rules, competition related to physical prowess and a playful nature."(Hinch & Higham, p. 56) As sport and tourism are embedded in the rise of the leisure class in society, the historical examination of their practice may reflect the contentious social issues and societal challenges. This paper will investigate the history of scholarship in sport tourism through the lens of bibliometric analysis. Search keyword sport tourism or sports tourism was used for data collection with the Scopus database, which generated 920 papers published in English. Using the bibliometric method on the collected data allows us to map the relationship between the literature based on VOS (Visualization of similarities) viewer by conducting citation, co-citation, and bibliographic coupling (See Figure 1). The analyses summarize prominent papers and backward- and forward-looking discourses (Mukherjee et al., 2022). The findings highlight the importance of the intersection of heritage and sport: heritage of sport (sport itself – experience, record, and narrative) and sport as heritage (implications to economy, culture, society, and politics). The scholarly examination of the mechanism of sport tourism also demonstrates inequity and marginalization in societal control over resources. Since sport and travel are critical to the well-being of individuals and communities, this critical examination may provide insights into the past, present, and future of sport tourism practices.