Unfolding the Intellectuality of Smart Tourism

Abstract

The creative uses of smart tourism have increased marketing effectiveness in the last ten years. The concept of smart tourism is still developing in the literature, and this study aimed to outline its evolution and current intellectual structure. The objective of this article is to examine the changes in smart tourism research by using keyword co-occurrence frequency, keyword centrality, and clustering. Furthermore, this study investigated the duration along with the evolution of the intellectual structure similarities by examining the correlation index of keyword centrality between different time segments. This is the first study in tourism literature that uses five centralities (i.e., degree, betweenness, closeness, eigenvector, and page rank) and network analysis to demonstrate changes in the intellectual structure of smart tourism. 724 documents published in Web of Science and Scopus were divided into 7-time segments. The keyword "Smart services" was found with the highest frequency and centrality. The continuous changes in keyword usage in different time segments revealed that the keyword "smart tourism" emerged during the 2017-2018 and 2021-2022 segments only. The research findings of this article may be helpful for academicians and practitioners of smart tourism.