50 years of tourism research in India: past trends and future directions Open Access

Tourism has become one of the significant topics of research in the field of social sciences in the last few decades. However, numerous academics have highlighted the lack of theoretical progress in tourism research (Echtner & Jamal, 1997; Tribe, 1997). In recent studies, tourism has been regarded as a growing field with concentrated literature and close links with parent fields (Xiao & Smith, 2006). On the other hand, a study done by Belhassen and Caton (2009) considers tourism research to be a nascent field that different disciplines and research practices have heavily influenced.

This surge in tourism research in recent years is due to several different reasons, including the interest of scholars and academicians in publishing and the expansion of journals on these subjects (Benckendorff & Zehrer, 2013). As a result, it is important to recognize the main trends of academic research conducted globally and at a regional level (Leung, Sun, & Bai, 2017).

India, being one of the most popular tourist destinations worldwide, is highly known throughout the world due to its vastness, strategic significance in Asian issues and old-world allure. Due to its exotic appeal and mystique, India has always drawn a specific type of foreign tourists who come to the country to discover and get glimpses of it (Nautiyal, Albrecht, & Carr, 2023). Foreign tourist arrivals (FTAs) in September 2023 were 648,213 compared to 551,580 in September 2022, registering a growth of 17.5% (Monthly Tourism Statistics September, 2023). Scholars have taken notice of the country’s explosive rise in both size and economic significance, which has led to an increase in the number of publications about Indian tourism and hospitality in recent years. In this context, these advances require a thorough evaluation of the literature because such an inventory of research work can be utilized to forecast future trends and issues (Tsang & Hsu, 2011). The position of India in the world tourism sector and the importance of Indian tourism research are excellent reasons for developing the present work. The mandatory questions, which include the number of published research articles about India, the authors who have contributed the most articles on Indian tourism and hospitality and the trends and features of Indian research, should be addressed promptly (Singh, 2016) for a better understanding of the Indian tourism research. However, there is a notable gap in the literature, particularly in quantitative reviews of the existing studies (Kumar, 2023).

Considering that previous literature review studies on Indian tourism have been primarily qualitative and subjective, our study aims to conduct a bibliometric review. While bibliometric analyses have been conducted on tourism research in other developing countries such as China (Bao, Huang, Sam, & Chen, 2019), Iran (Seyfi, Hall, & Kuhzady, 2019) and Turkey (Evren & Kozak, 2014), there remains a notable gap in the bibliometric assessment of Indian tourism research. Studies on these countries have provided valuable insights into research trends, influential authors and knowledge structures, yet no similar large-scale quantitative review exists for India. Our study aims to bridge this gap by applying performance analysis and science mapping techniques to systematically evaluate tourism research in India.

To the best of our knowledge, this study represents the first bibliometric analysis of Indian tourism research. By identifying key research themes, influential scholars and emerging trends, this study not only contributes to the academic discourse on tourism in India but also serves as a valuable resource for policymakers, researchers and industry stakeholders in shaping future research and policy directions. Our study has addressed the following research questions:

The term “bibliometrics” is derived from two Greek roots: “biblio,” meaning “book” and “metrics,” which refers to “measurement” (Sengupta, 1992). Bibliometric analysis involves the quantitative examination of documents using statistical and mathematical methods (Ng, 2022). According to Zupic and Čater (2015), bibliometric techniques boost the objectivity of review studies compared to traditional review techniques and organized literature reviews (Koseoglu, Rahimi, Okumus, & Liu, 2016).

According to Ye, Song, and Li (2012), bibliometrics evaluates study findings, taking into account themes, methodologies and samples. Bibliometric techniques can be divided into various categories. Benckendorff and Zehrer (2013) established two types of bibliometric studies: (1) evaluative method and (2) relational method. Evaluative methods evaluate performance using impact metrics, productivity measurements and hybrid metrics with an emphasis on the effects of academic studies (Hall, 2011). On the other hand, by taking into account citations, authors, affiliations and keywords to perform co-occurrence analysis, the relational method probes into the relationships among published articles (Leydesdorff & Vaughan, 2006; Ronda-Pupo & Guerras-Martin, 2012). These methods assist readers and scholars in understanding the social, intellectual and emerging research themes in the various domains (Nerur, Rasheed, & Pandey, 2016; Pilkington & Lawton, 2014; Tan & Ding, 2015).

Bibliometric studies have been conducted in different areas of study over the years. In the field of social science, this kind of study has been done in areas such as accounting (Merigó & Yang, 2017), economics (Bonilla, Merigó, & Torres-Abad, 2015), management (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Podsakoff, & Bachrach, 2008), marketing (Samiee & Chabowski, 2012) and strategic management (Vogel & Güttel, 2012). In the tourism sector also, bibliometric studies have been conducted to identify the academic foundation, intellectual structure, knowledge domain or social structure of the field (Benckendorff & Zehrer, 2013; Hu & Racherla, 2008; Koseoglu et al., 2016; Ye, Li, & Law, 2013) and to rank the most productive scholars, publications and countries (McKercher, Law, & Lam, 2006; Page, 2005; Park, Phillips, Canter, & Abbott, 2011; Zhao & Ritchie, 2007). Numerous bibliometric studies focusing on the tourism sector have been conducted over the years, with a particular emphasis on analyses grounded in country-specific contexts. Such studies include Evren and Kozak (2014) in Turkey, Seyfi et al. (2019) in Iran, Bao et al. (2019) in China and Kato and Horita (2018) in Japan. However, there is a dearth of such studies on the Indian tourism sector (Pahlevan-Sharif, Mura, & Wijesinghe, 2019).

India is among the growing emerging global markets (Sheth, 2011). Due to its diverse cultures, traditions, ecosystems and physiography, which includes a vast network of national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, conservation reserves and community reserves, India is considered one of the most fascinating tourist destinations with a lot of potential (Cabral & Dhar, 2020).

Tourism-related activities have increased nationwide due to India’s National Tourism Policy 2002, which aimed to achieve socio-cultural and economic advantages. Looking at the previous year’s data, India’s FTAs increased by 305.4% to 6.19 million (provisional estimates), generating foreign exchange earnings of Rs. 135,543 crore (provisional estimates), upward of 106.77% (Annual Report 2022-23, 2023).

In terms of traffic, tourism patterns have already begun to indicate potential for expansion. Researchers’ attention has been drawn to the country’s quick rise in size and economic significance, which has led to an increase in the number of publications published on Indian hospitality and tourism in recent decades (Singh, 2016).

Over the years, a lot of research has been done on the development of tourism in India. This series of research work needs to be evaluated to determine the aspects that have been covered and also to determine the future scope of research. Most studies that attempted to monitor developments in hospitality and tourism research used content analysis (Singh, 2016), although they left out several publications from the field and related fields. Additionally, such analysis appears unable to determine the total research productivity at the national and global levels due to their small sample sizes. Only a limited number of bibliometric studies have been conducted on the Indian tourism sector, primarily concentrating on niche segments such as sustainable tourism (Payini, Kamath, Kamath, & Mallya, 2024), mountain tourism (Zeng, Li, Nuttapong, Sun, & Mao, 2022) and medical tourism (Ghosh & VK, 2022), resulting in a scarcity of bibliometric studies addressing tourism as a whole in India. Nonetheless, the advancement of bibliometric research in Indian tourism research and its impact on the knowledge domain of the discipline or theoretical development remain unclear. Therefore, the current work aims to fill this research gap.

In bibliometrics, relationships between “cited” and “citing” literature are examined (Rodríguez-López, Alcántara-Pilar, Del Barrio-García, & Muñoz-Leiva, 2020). Authorship analysis, citation analysis, word frequency analysis, co-occurrence analysis of keywords and simple document counting, like the number of publications by an author, journal or nation, are some of the bibliometric techniques used (Borgman & Furner, 2005). Identification of the research fields and sources that should be examined is necessary for bibliometric analysis. The current study has conducted a performance analysis of authors and articles, as well as a co-citation analysis and co-authorship analysis using the VOSviewer software package.

For this study, we have selected the literature on the field of tourism in the Indian context. In order to achieve this, the Scopus database was used to look up all of the academic works that had been published up until the year 2023. The Scopus database was used because it encompasses a broader range of journals compared to other databases such as Web of Science (Singh, Singh, Karmakar, Leta, & Mayr, 2021). Moreover, Scopus has facilities for the export of bibliographic information about documents and the data employed in bibliographic reviews (Krittayaruangroj, Suriyankietkaew, & Hallinger, 2023). The articles were extracted from the Scopus database on July 25, 2024. The search string used was title, abstract and keywords using the terms (“tourism” OR “tour” OR “travel” OR “trip”) AND (“India” OR “Indian”), which resulted in a total of 12,623 articles. The search results indicated that the number of published articles in the database was very small until 1973. Before 1973, only 86 articles were published in the context of Indian tourism, as per our search criteria. Therefore, the timeframe of 1973–2023 was chosen in the next stage, resulting in a total of 12,537 articles. In the next stage, only journal articles were selected, excluding conference papers and book chapters, because, compared to conferences and book chapters, journal publications typically undergo a more stringent peer-review process, which enhances the credibility of the research published in journals (Saha, Mani, & Goyal, 2020). The outcome was 8,506 articles. Further filtration was done by excluding all the other subject areas except for “Social Sciences,” “Business, Management and Accounting,” with the focus of this study to get business, marketing and social sciences perspectives, as tourism is generally considered a field of social sciences and business (Ng, 2022). It resulted in 3,582 documents. Finally, we selected the articles only in the English language so that the authors could read the details of the articles and identify relevant content, which showed us 3,436 results. These final 3,436 pieces were selected for review, and the literature was analyzed to find the final implication. The flow diagram in Figure 1 shows our search strategy.

The 3,436 articles selected for analysis generated 22,614 citations, covering 420 different journals over the last 50 years (1973–2023). The variation in the publication numbers over the years in different journals of the selected fields is shown in Figure 2.

Initially, the number of articles published in these fields was significantly less because of the low availability of journals in SCOPUS, and the importance of research in different aspects of tourism in India or the Indian context was not addressed. The earliest piece of writing on Indian tourism considered for our study is by Mountfort (1973), titled “Saving the Tiger.” However, only since the 2000s has the importance of research in this area linearly increased, and since the 2010s, the number of publications started to increase significantly (RQ1). In 2022, the highest number of articles (300) were published in the Scopus database due to growing research in this field. This growing popularity has called for an extensive study to explore the themes of past research done and future potential and scope in this field. In order to evaluate the critical issues in the area, a bibliometric study of tourism literature in the Indian context has been carried out. This analysis will aid future scholars in determining the subjects they should focus on.

To address RQ2, performance analysis was done to identify the authors, sources and articles that contributed the most to Indian tourism research. Table 1 shows the top 10 highest cited journals in the selected fields of research. The top 10 most frequently cited journals accounted for 22% of total citations. The most cited journal, in this case, is Tourism Management (950 citations), followed by the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management (895 citations) and Annals of Tourism Research (797 citations). The dominance of these journals in citation counts indicates that Indian tourism research is largely influenced by global tourism theories and empirical studies. The presence of transportation-focused journals (Transport Policy and Transportation Research Parts D and A) highlights the increasing scholarly interest in infrastructure, mobility and sustainability in Indian tourism development.

The most frequently referenced papers are also listed in this section, which serves as a reliable indicator of the most important studies. The top 10 publications ever referenced in the chosen subject areas are listed in Table 2. The most cited articles reveal the key themes shaping Indian tourism research. Manaktola and Jauhari (2007), with the highest citations, emphasize sustainable practices in Indian hospitality, suggesting that environmental responsibility has been a long-standing concern. Kaushal and Srivastava (2021), in a recent study, highlight tourism resilience post-pandemic, reflecting a shift in research focus due to global disruptions. Additionally, studies like Edensor (2000) and Henderson (2007), which examine tourism behavior and crisis management, suggest that Indian tourism research has drawn heavily from global frameworks to address local challenges.

The top 10 most cited writers are also listed in this section using bibliometric analysis. Table 3 displays the outcomes. It should be noted that the number of citations is what determines these rankings. Though the highest cited authors, Manaktola and Jauhari, are from India, most of the other influential authors belong to developed nations like the UK, USA and Australia. These authors have contributed to various ideas and addressed emerging issues like consumerism, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the transport crisis in India.

Three techniques are used for science mapping: co-citation analysis, co-authorship analysis and co-occurrence analysis of keywords.

When a pair of articles are cited in two different publications, the pair is said to have been co-cited (Jiang, Ritchie, & Benckendorff, 2019). For RQ3, co-citation analysis was done to discover the growing research themes. Using VOSviewer, a co-cited authors’ network was developed with a threshold of a minimum of 10 citations. Figure 3 shows the co-citation result. The nodes are linking 102 connected co-cited authors. Bigger nodes have more citations, and the thickness of the lines represents the strength of co-citations. The color of the bubble represents the cluster to which the article belongs. Seven clusters were formed to represent the co-cited authors. Cluster 1 has 24 and cluster 2 has 23 items. Clusters 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 have 19, 17, 12, 4 and 3 items, respectively. The themes of these clusters are discussed below.

The cluster in red is the largest (24 items). It primarily focuses on articles addressing vacations during and after the COVID-19 pandemic and the risks associated with it. It also focuses on tourist motivation and consumer behavior of the tourists traveling in India (Kaushal & Srivastava, 2021; Lepp & Gibson, 2003; Sigala, 2020). This is likely due to the risk of traveling after the pandemic, as most of these articles were published after 2020.

The cluster in green (23 items) is focused on the articles that address the cultural identity, authenticity and religious aspects of the Indian tourism industry. India is well known for its diverse culture and religious beliefs (Hill, 2002; Wang, 1999; Rinschede, 1992), and many articles have considered that aspect for research.

The third cluster in dark blue (19 items) comprises articles that focus on recent topics like sustainability, local food and protection and conservation, as these are emerging research topics in the tourism industry (Kim, Eves, & Scarles, 2009; Liu, 2003).

The fourth cluster (yellow) has 17 items. This cluster mainly addresses issues like destination image, their perceived value and tourist satisfaction. This is because tourists’ perception of the destination and their satisfaction during and after the trip play a significant role in tourism (Baloglu & McCleary, 1999; Beerli & Martín, 2004).

Cluster 5 in purple has 12 items. In this cluster, articles focused on medical tourism in India and articles addressing service quality of the Indian tourism sector are grouped together. Inbound and outbound tourism for medical purposes make up a significant proportion of the tourism industry in India (Connell, 2013; Han & Hyun, 2015), and it is important to dive into that aspect.

In this cluster (light blue, four items), articles that are grouped together primarily focus on staged authenticity and how it is used to attract tourists in India. “Staged authenticity” is a process where tourism providers put their culture on display to attract travelers who seek genuine experiences (MacCannell, 1973).

The last cluster in orange (three items) groups together the articles focusing on India’s tourism development. These studies investigate the relationship between tourism and economic growth in India and discuss policies for attracting more international tourists (Ohlan, 2017).

Regarding the social structure of authors (RQ4), it is evident that authors tend to collaborate more frequently with other authors from their own country. The predominant form of collaboration occurs among researchers from different institutions within the same country. However, there is a significant number of collaborations between Indian authors and researchers from the UK, the USA, Australia, Germany and the United Arab Emirates. Figure 4 shows the network visualization of the analysis of co-authorship by countries. The goal of a co-authorship network is to show the collaboration between authors from different institutions and nations in a particular area of research (Guan & Huang, 2023). The countries represent the different institutions established in that specific country. The minimum number of publications was set to 5 and minimum citations to 10 for each writer of institutions established in a specific country. Only 50 of the 130 total countries meet the requirement. A network was formed with 50 nodes, a total link strength of 809 and 267 links. In this analysis, the size of the node serves as a representation of the weight attribute of total link strength. The size of the node increases with the total link strength. Total link strength is a measure of the level of collaboration between authors connected to institutions worldwide. Authors from institutions based in the USA (total link strength = 213), UK (total link strength = 167) and Australia (total link strength = 101), along with India (total link strength = 388), display the most robust collaboration in research on tourism in India.

A graphical representation of topics and their connections representing the conceptual space of a field is generated using keyword co-occurrence analysis (Martínez-López, Merigó, Valenzuela-Fernández, & Nicolás, 2018). In the graphical network, the size of a circle indicates how relevant an item is, and the network connections show which objects are most closely related to one another. The items are grouped together using the arrangement of the circles and the colors. The number of co-occurrences between keywords is negatively correlated with the distance between two nodes. Therefore, closer distances imply a higher co-occurrence of keywords.

This paper highlights the research interests of the articles using the author’s keyword co-occurrence analysis, addressing RQ5. The primary relationships between the most common words used in this research are represented in this map. Figure 5 shows the result. Keywords with a minimum of 10 occurrences were considered. In total, 396 out of 13,614 keywords met the threshold. This shows different themes and aspects that are covered in the past literature like globalization (keywords: globalization, South Asia, migration and trade), development (keywords: World Trade Organization (WTO), patent, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and agreement), awareness (keywords: trust, destination image and social media) and sustainable consumption (keywords: sustainability, climate change, travel behavior and public transport). The keyword India has the highest frequency of 1,304. The term tourism has the second highest occurrence of 386. Keyword co-occurrence analysis also shows a shift in interest in topics over the years.

Next, Figure 6 reveals the typical year of publication of papers that contain a specific keyword. It shows the evolution of Indian tourism research over time, with node size representing keyword frequency and color indicating the timeframe of emergence of the keywords. India and tourism, the primary keywords, are in light orange, indicating that the typical year for articles including these terms is around 2015. In the early years (before 2000), research focused on tourism development, ecotourism and cultural identity, laying the groundwork for broader studies. Between 2000 and 2015, themes expanded to include sustainability, governance and transportation, influenced by India’s National Tourism Policy (2002). From 2015 onward, research shifted towards tourist behavior, decision-making and customer satisfaction, with emerging topics like medical tourism and COVID-19’s impact.

India has a long history of tourism. It has been an attraction for both domestic and international tourists for decades. Along with the growing interest of tourists, there has been an increase in research among academicians regarding India’s tourism sector. Heck, Cooley, and Hubbard (1986) discussed the value of publishing research, asserting that doing so advances the intellectual standing of specific subjects and enhances teaching effectiveness. Our study findings indicate that there has been a remarkable increase in tourism studies in India over the past 50 years. From a scholarly perspective, our findings can aid scholars in understanding current trends, significant themes, influential authors, publications and countries that contributed the most to the research of tourism in India. This can potentially encourage the creation of new research connections and ideas, thus improving the field’s academic standing. Firstly, the most prolific authors (Table 3) and key research publications of the domain (Table 2) might be referred to for knowledge development. Table 1 shows the top 10 journals that are cited the most, which can be used by scholars as a reference when deciding which journals to submit one’s work to. Figure 4, which lists the countries with the most vigorous collaboration, can be referred to by academicians and researchers looking for collaborative work. The study’s findings revealed that Indian scholars have a propensity towards collaborative research. Therefore, Indian multilingual scholars may benefit from their native tongue and cultural background to forge connections with colleagues abroad.

The findings of this study also have practical implications for both decision-makers and society at large. Figure 5 illustrates the diverse aspects of Indian tourism, as identified through the cluster analysis. These clusters show the various themes that drew research attention in the Indian tourism sector. These results highlight India’s diverse tourism offerings beyond its traditional image of spirituality and wellness. These insights can aid destination managers and tourism providers in effectively promoting Indian tourism internationally.

Looking back is frequently necessary in order to move forward. After evaluating the field’s progress over the past five decades, the emphasis might move to pondering the prospects for India’s future tourism and hospitality research. The following future research agenda can be identified based on our study:

• (1)

  Role of technology in promoting tourism: Research should explore the potential of emerging technology in promoting tourism in India, including the role of information and communications technologies, virtual reality, blockchain technology and artificial intelligence (AI). Blockchain technology can revolutionize the tourism and hospitality industry by shifting from a centralized server-based Internet system to a transparent cryptographic network. Travel companies can also use AI chatbots for 24/7 customer support, improved engagement automatic lead capturing and competitive advantage.

• (2)

  Collaboration among stakeholders: Analyzing the relationships between the various stakeholders in the Indian tourism industry – food producers, chefs, local communities, restaurant owners, legislators, tour operators and tourists – highlights the opportunities and challenges of creating sustainable and ethical strategies that encourage cooperation and partnership-building.

• (3)

  Development of rural economy: Research can be done on the potential of tourism as an instrument for entrepreneurship, local economic assistance and rural development. Policymakers and stakeholders can establish policies that maximize positive impact by developing a better understanding of socio-economic impacts, such as the contribution to employment, income production and economic growth.

• (4)

  Focus on sustainable development goals (SDGs): The SDGs address multidimensional issues at the intersection of socio-economic and environmental systems (Diéguez-Castrillón, Gueimonde-Canto, & Rodríguez-López, 2022). India, being a country of rich natural diversity and culture, should come up with innovative ideas to address all of these goals.

• (5)

  Policy recommendation: Researchers can focus on studies that provide policy recommendations for developing tourism in India. The National Tourism Policy (2002) played a crucial role in shaping academic research by emphasizing infrastructure development, private sector participation and sustainable tourism practices. Several studies have analyzed its impact on eco-tourism, heritage conservation and rural tourism (Geneletti & Dawa, 2009; Kaul & Gupta, 2009; Singh, 2002). However, gaps remain in assessing its long-term effectiveness, especially considering the changes in global travel trends and emerging tourism models like virtual tourism and regenerative tourism. Future research can critically evaluate these gaps and propose updated policy frameworks that align with contemporary challenges such as climate change, community-based tourism and entrepreneurial growth in the sector.

There are several shortcomings in our study that need to be addressed. First, only the Scopus database was used for the data searches. Other databases can also be used to provide better figures. Second, the search was limited to English-language journal publications, which leaves the drawback of finding other types of documents. Finally, we only used one type of software for data analysis, and only a few types of analyses were shown in the study. Therefore, tourism researchers should consider correcting these flaws in their future work.

Although there are several publications on the topic of tourism in India, it can be concluded that there is still scope for further study. The collaboration results show that there is a lot of scope for collaborating with other countries in this regard, as India is only collaborating with a handful of nations. Studying the titles of the articles, it can also be concluded that research done in India in the tourism sector still focuses on fewer and traditional aspects like religious tourism, ecotourism, green practices, adventure tourism and tourism during and after COVID-19. There is plenty of scope for researchers to focus on contemporary themes like senior tourism, smart tourism, revenge tourism, metaverse and tourism 5.0.