A bibliometric analysis of pedagogies adopted in tourism and hospitality education

Tourism education is critical to tourism and hospitality industry. Employers from the industry have been calling for the need that tourism educators should produce students that are capable of and adaptive in working in this ever-changing industry (Ahmad et al., 2018). McKercher et al. (2023) reported that soft skills capacity is equally important as hard skills and technical competencies. While classroom tutorials were important for tourism and hotel students to learn about the theories, increasing research has shown that the industry requires students to have hands-on experience too (Mei, 2019; Lehto et al., 2022; Kunwar, 2018). Kim and Davies (2014) proposed that the practice-oriented teaching method should help facilitate the actual teaching practices in tourism education. Internship has thus been adopted as an additional pedagogy in tourism education (Ogbeide et al., 2020). Arcodia and Dickson (2009) suggested that experiential-based education method can supplement the weaknesses of traditional teaching methods. Students will be able to actively learn from a quasi-real-life simulation that could help transform theories into practice.

Tourism pedagogy is reported as a fundamental reason affecting the quality of tourism education (Gao et al., 2021). Often it is shaped and reshaped according to the market’s needs (Fidgeon, 2010). While the industry-led tourism education model retains to be important and is believed to help reduce the possibility of having a mismatch between the educational outputs and the industry’s expectation (Lillo-Bañuls and Casado-Díaz, 2015). The need-based learning model is not without criticism. Such a learning model has been criticized for over-subjugating tourism students’ critical thinking, research capabilities (Slocum et al., 2019; Rhein, 2017; Novy and Colomb, 2019). The ensued educational outputs tend to be servient (Mínguez et al., 2021). Tight (2015) argued that the true purpose of higher education is to cultivate well-rounded, knowledgeable and thoughtful talents rather than to simply prepare students with the skills to serve. Belhassen and Caton (2011) corroborated that tourism education is responsible for and consequential to sustainable tourism development.

In other words, selecting a right combination of pedagogies is critical in influencing students’ capabilities, thus affecting the quality of educational outputs. Adopting appropriate and timely tourism pedagogies is thus regarded as a useful mechanism to stimulate students’ enthusiasm and participation in learning. It is also a way to transform theories into practice, to facilitate the growth of independent and critical thinking and to help develop students’ professional integrity and consciousness (Griffin, 2021; Menon et al., 2022; Ye and Law, 2021).

Bibliometric analyses have been adopted in many previous studies related to tourism and hospitality education (Menon et al., 2022) as well as in other academic disciplines (Li et al., 2023). While existing literature has shed light on various aspects and impacts of tourism education, there is a lack of examination on identifying the evolution of tourism pedagogies over time. For those previous studies that adopted bibliometric analyses, their main research objectives focused less on identifying the shifts in tourism pedagogy, in particular to track the changes of research facets in tourism pedagogies. For instance, Coll-Ramis et al. (2023) used bibliometric analysis to showcase the relationship between tourism and education since 1950. Their research objective nevertheless centred on how tourism education was used as a means to enrich students’ environmental, cultural and social awareness. Ulker et al. (2022) similarly used bibliometric analysis in which 136 studies were reviewed. The authors reported that talent management, resources management, customers services were the frequently researched topics. Their bibliometric analysis was thus not exclusively centred on pedagogies related to tourism and hospitality. The current study adopted a bibliometric analysis to address this gap with an aim to identify the changing structure of knowledge production themed in teaching methods related to tourism and hospitality education. Citespace was adopted for data mining algorithms and visualization of research trends (Chen, 2016). This present study aims to investigate the main research facets related to tourism pedagogies over the years from 2000 to 2022. In particular, the current study aims at answering the following questions:

The study aims to review the pedagogy articles related to tourism and hospitality education. A bibliometric analysis was applied to identify the structure of knowledge production themed in this area. The current study uses Citespace 6.1 to conduct keywords co-occurrence analysis, co-citation analysis, institutional collaboration analysis and hotspots analysis (Chen, 2016). Articles were gathered from Web of Science (WoS) database, which is one of the popular data sets that tourism researchers rely on (Chen, 2016). As the main aim of the current study is to reveal the research facets related to tourism pedagogies since 2000 when WoS started to document articles in this vein, the following keywords were used to unearth the relevant papers from the data set, namely, “tourism and hospitality education” or “hotel education” or “education in tourism studies” or “travel education” and “teaching method” or “pedagogy” or “teaching approaches”. In addition, because the research inquiry of the current research involves a broad range of articles related to pedagogies across different academic disciplines, articles thus themed in travel, education and pedagogies have been included for analysis. While “Meeting abstracts” and “letter” were excluded, “articles”, “early access”, “review articles”, “editorial notes” and “proceeding papers” were included for the extraction. To clean the data and avoid duplications, the raw data were put into the “Data Directories” for filtering. Via a panel review and cross-checked independently by the research team members, a total of 847 articles were retained for further analysis.

Four analyses, including descriptive analysis, collaboration network analysis, co-citation analysis and keyword co-occurrence network analysis were conducted and they were discussed in turn. Firstly, the reason for conducting a descriptive analysis is to understand the field of tourism education teaching methods. Secondly, the collaboration network analysis reveals the main countries, institutions and researchers who contribute the most to tourism education teaching methods. Thirdly, the co-citation analysis provides insights into the structure of the research domains of this field by arranging according to the co-citations in the source papers. Finally, keyword co-occurrence network analysis and clustering analysis are used to summarize the current research hotspots of tourism education teaching methods and analyse the changing research focus of this topic.

Changes in the number of research articles of a particular field reflect to some extent the research trends and development of tourism pedagogies. Figure 1 presents the publication progress of literature related to tourism education research methods from 2000 to 2022. Over the years, there has been a steady growth of tourism education research methods, and that can be divided into three stages:

1. A slow development stage (2000–2009), and the research mainly focused on the characteristics of and benefits brought about by the various tourism education teaching methods (Meier et al., 2006), characteristics of learners and tourism educators (Ivanic et al., 2007) and the integration of e-learning with traditional teaching methods (Susser and Ariga, 2006).

2. A rapid developing stage (2010–2017), in which the number of research articles in tourism pedagogies has been increased drastically. The research focus centred on online learning methods for tourism education and critical tourism teaching methods (Mair and Sumner, 2017).

3. An explosion stage (2018–2022) was the period when a large number of articles related to tourism education teaching methods was produced. The research focus centred on two main themes. The first theme was related to online learning as fuelled by the rapid growth and popularity of online learning (Chen et al., 2022). Ye and Law (2021) stated that information and communication technology (ICT) has become not merely a supplementary component, but a prerequisite in tourism education. The second theme was related to the outbreak of COVID-19. Due to the fact that the social mobility was largely suspended during the pandemic, online tutorials replaced the on-site face-to-face teaching mode, which is consequential both to the mechanism of knowledge dissemination as well as pedagogies chosen to cope with the challenges brought about by the pandemic (Valsaraj et al., 2021).

Collaboration network analysis shows the relationships between collaborating countries as well as how influential those countries are contributing to research in tourism pedagogies. Each node represents a country and the size of the country’s font reflects its position in the collaboration network, while the size of the node represents the number of research articles produced by a particular country. The thickness of the lines represents the intensity of collaboration between those countries. As shown in Figure 2, the national collaboration network consists of 95 nodes and 235 lines, with an overall network density of 0.053, indicating some degree of collaboration between countries. Table 1 lists the top ten countries in terms of number of publications. The USA and England appear to have a closer collaboration node. In terms of number of publications, the USA tops the list (n = 163), followed by China (n = 87). England (n = 64), Spain (n = 63) and Australia (n = 54).

Betweenness centrality is an indicator to measure the degree of influence of a node in the entire network. To decode, the higher the betweenness centrality of a node represents the fact that the node is closely connected to other nodes. It is a guideline suggesting that a greater influence exists in the network. If the betweenness centrality of a node is greater than 0.1, it can be considered as a key node. As evidenced in Table 1, the USA, England, Spain, Canada and Australia were the countries with strong influence in publishing research in tourism pedagogies. In addition, the USA, England, Australia and Canada were the countries which produced the early batch of tourism pedagogies research in year 2000.

The institutional collaboration network showcases the co-operative patterns among different institutions. Figure 3 shows that the institutional co-operation network has 447 nodes and 215 links, with an overall network density of 0.0022, indicating that there is a light density among institutions’ collaborations. Table 2 lists the top ten institutions that contributed the most to the tourism pedagogies research. The University of Waterloo has the highest number of publications (n = 9), followed by the Complutense University of Madrid (n = 8), the Griffith University (n = 8), the University of Toronto (n = 7) and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (n = 6).

The author collaboration network reveals the collaboration relationships and contributions made among the authors. As shown in Figure 4, the author collaboration network has 572 nodes and 539 edges, with an overall network density of 0.0017, indicating a weak collaboration among the authors in this field. Table 3 presents the top ten authors in terms of the number of publication outputs. Karla (n = 6) and Yonggang (n = 4) appear to be the most productive authors in this field. Their research focuses on innovative teaching methods (Boluk et al., 2019; An and Wang, 2015), critical teaching methods (Boluk and Carnicelli, 2019) and teaching method reformations (Carnicelli and Boluk, 2017).

Figure 5 shows the findings that are derived from the co-citation analysis. The co-citation analysis is applied to assess the quality and impact of those research articles, hereby referring to the pedagogies related to tourism education. Nodes in the network represent the cited references while links between nodes represent the number of times of citations that appeared in the source papers. The current co-citation network has 717 nodes and 1474 links, with an overall network density of 0.0057. Table 5 lists the top ten most cited papers based on their Global Citation Scores (GCS), with Rob Hales having the GCS value (n = 17), followed by David Airey (n = 11) and Kellee Caton (n = 9), among others.

This study conducted cluster analysis using the natural logarithm algorithm (see Figure 6). Clusters labels were retrieved using the Log-likelihood Rotation algorithm (LLR algorithm). LLR provides unique labels to the clusters which reflect the core research domains. The results showed that the largest cluster in this study is Cluster #0 “New technologies fieldwork”, with 52 articles included, focusing on students’ involvement, teaching tourism, vocational education, communications technology and tourism students, educational administrator; theory approach; tourism education; tourism student. The second-largest cluster was “Endorsing gamification pedagogy”, containing 31 articles, with research focuses on tourism education, COVID-19-induced disruption, helpful strategy, endorsing gamification pedagogy and tourism education system. Dhawan’s research (2020) for example within this cluster, entitled “Online Learning: A Panacea in the Time of COVID-19 Crisis” was the most important article of Cluster #1. Dhawan’s study was about online learning and teaching methods. The third largest cluster was labelled “Pedagogical framework”, consisting of 28 articles, with a research focus centres on critical framework, sustainable development goals, volunteer tourism and pedagogic experience. Heather Mair’s research (2015) on critical teaching methods had the highest citation frequency within this cluster, entitled “Critical tourism pedagogies: Exploring the potential through food”, which was published in Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism Education. For details of the remaining clusters, please refer to Table 4. Table 5 presents the top ten most cited articles related to pedagogies in tourism education.

The analysis of journals’ co-citations can help researchers discover the most frequently cited journals and their influence. Figure 7 shows the co-citation network of journals, which consists of 786 nodes and 3,419 edges, with an overall network density of 0.011. At the same time, Table 6 shows the top ten most cited journals. Journal of Hospitality Leisure Sport & Tourism Education received the highest citations (n = 96), followed by Tourism Management (n = 88) and Journal of Teaching in Travel & Tourism (n = 84). These results indicate that journals in the tourism, education and hospitality research fields have played a key role in the knowledge production of tourism education and teaching methods rather than articles in pure tourism science.

The emergence of citations indicates that a certain research field is receiving increasing attention (see Figure 8). The burst values of the Journal of Hospitality Leisure Sport & Tourism Education, and Tourism Management are 25.67 and 25.32, respectively. From the degree and time nodes of citation emergence of the cited journals, one can see that there is a significant growth of research production in this field in the past two years and the research focus centres on documenting changes in tourism education and tourism pedagogies. For example, smart tourism is a tourism service model fuelled by modern information technology. Smart tourism has thus revolutionized the ways of knowledge dissemination as well as pedagogies adopted for smart tourism education. The issues of enhancing students’ interest and learning effectiveness via ICT facilitation, as well as the quality of education have become the main research domain (Bilotta et al., 2021). Similarly, sustainable tourism practice requires a series of strategies and actions to be implemented, among which tourism education plays a crucial role. Previous studies have reported that the emergence of sustainable tourism teaching methods can improve the effectiveness and benefits of tourism education, which are consequential to the development of students’ environmental awareness and a sense of responsibility (Torres Valdés et al., 2019).

To understand how the research field of tourism education and teaching methods have evolved over time, keyword co-occurrence analysis was adopted. Figure 9 presents the keyword co-occurrence network map, which has 525 nodes and 1708 edges, with an overall network density of 0.0124. Table 7 lists the top 20 high-frequency keywords, including “education”, “higher education”, “student”, “tourism”, “pedagogy”, “experience”, “perception” and “tourism education”. Those keywords represent the current research trends and hot topics in the field.

The co-occurrence results of keywords can be divided into four categories:

1. The first category is about education and teaching, including “Education, Higher education, Pedagogy, Critical pedagogy and Online learning”. Those keywords are related to education and teaching issues. “Education” and “higher education” emphasize the scope of the research topic, while “Pedagogy” and “Critical pedagogy” focus on exploring teaching methods. “Online learning” highlights new ways and teaching methods of online learning facilitated by the resourceful technology.

2. The second category is about students and educational experience, including “student, experience and perception”.

3. The third category is about tourism education and knowledge, including “tourism education, program, knowledge and model”, suggesting that the research domain of this category focuses on model construction of tourism education.

4. The fourth category is about practical influence and management, including “impact, hospitality, management and performance”.

Those keywords reflect the connection between the forms and teaching methods adopted for tourism education.

Keyword clustering analysis is a visualization tool that can provide insights into the nature and patterns of the data. Figure 10 below displays the keyword clustering of research on tourism education and teaching methods. The result shows a Modularity Q value of 0.6171, which is greater than 0.4 suggesting that the cluster map results are acceptable. The Mean Silhouette value is 0.8432, indicating a high degree of similarity within the clusters and high reliability.

According to Table 8, the top ten clusters were from 2009 to 2018, indicating that the research on tourism education teaching methods has been increasing as a popular research topic. Among them, the largest cluster appeared in 2018 and the research facet focused on “critical pedagogy”, in which nine keywords were included, such as “critical pedagogy”, “sustainable tourism”, “sustainable development goals”, “critical literacy”, “global citizenship”, “global citizenship education”, “social class”, “education policy” and “comparative education”. The second-largest cluster was “blended learning”, which included nine keywords, including “creative analytic practice”, “integrated curriculum design”, “tourism pedagogy”, “services marketing”, “hospitality services”, “student”, “program”, “experience” and “school”.

In other words, critical pedagogy and critical literacy have become the hotspots in tourism pedagogy research. Research in this vein emphasizes the need for having a critical analysis of tourism education and teaching methods. Teachers were encouraged to adopt creative analytic practice to promote students’ ability to think critically and creatively (Kim and Davies, 2014). Meanwhile, due to the growing importance of sustainable development goals, one of the research hotspots is to integrate sustainable goals into tourism education and teaching methods. Educators should use the concepts of global citizenship education to cultivate students’ global awareness and a sense of responsibility, thereby promoting the sustainable development of the tourism industry. In addition, integrated curriculum design and tourism pedagogy have also become the hotspots in research, in particular on integrating knowledge from different academic disciplines into tourism education and teaching methods (see Boluk et al., 2019). In summary, recent research focused on fostering the underpinning theories of tourism pedagogies which could facilitate students’ critical thinking as well as their sense of sustainability.

As indicated below, Figure 11 illustrates the results of the keywords time zone, the year of the node represents the first appearance of the keyword in the current literature. The lines connecting different nodes indicate that those keywords appeared in the same document. The number of documents published in different years reflect the publication status at that time.

The most significant nodes for tourism education and teaching methods are “education”, “student”, “pedagogy”, “tourism” and “experience”. These nodes started from 2005 to 2018, indicating that teaching methods have always been associated with “tourism”, “experience”, “students” and “education itself”. As time goes by, the research focus of this field has shifted, and concepts such as skill, management and competence have emerged.

The co-occurrence network graph is presented in Figure 12, which can help researchers to categorize the different research themes and their respective developmental patterns. There are in total 144 nodes and 267 edges, and an overall network density of 0.026. Table 9 presents the top five research subject categories, including “Education & Education Research”; “Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism”; “Education, Scientific disciplines”; “Management”; and “Social sciences, Interdisciplinary”. The results indicate that tourism is a cross-disciplinary input for tourism and hospitality education. The current analysis shows that there is a lack of cross-disciplinary integration between tourism education and tourism pedagogies. Finding as such sheds light on the need to strengthen cross-disciplinary collaborative research by integrating knowledge and teaching methods from different academic disciplines, so that tourism pedagogies in tourism education could be enriched (Darbellay and Stock, 2012).

This study provides a systematic overview of research articles of pedagogies related to tourism and hospitality education. Based on a collection of 847 articles from WoS, CiteSpace was used as an analytical tool for the current bibliometric study. The present review analyses co-operation distribution networks. In addition, co-citation analysis, keyword co-occurrence and research hotspots analysis were conducted.

Pedagogies related to tourism education has been reshaped according to stakeholders’ expectations, designated learning outcomes and ever-changing tourism practices revolving around the constant social, techno and economic forces (Qiu et al., 2021). Tourism pedagogy is found to have a drastic increase in 2017. Interdisciplinary collaboration and practical experience were found to be important components of tourism education. Findings show that there is a need to strengthen the interdisciplinary convergence in doing tourism pedagogies research. Institutions, namely, the University of Waterloo, Complutense University of Madrid, Griffith University, the University of Toronto and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University have contributed the most to the knowledge production of research in tourism education teaching methods. Boluk, Karla is found to be the influential author contributing to this research field.

As evidenced in the above analysis, research on tourism education teaching methods mainly focuses on four categories: education and teaching methods, student and educational experience, tourism education and knowledge and practical impacts and management. Dewey (1974) believed that knowledge and actions should be integrated and grounded in a learning process, knowledge and skills acquired should be internalized and transformed into behaviour. Therefore, in tourism education, theoretical knowledge and practical operation need to be combined to translate what is learnt into real practices. Rob Hales, David Airey and Kellee Caton are the most frequently cited contributors in the field of tourism education.

In addition, the Journal of Hospitality Leisure Sport & Tourism Education, Tourism Management and the Journal of Teaching in Travel & Tourism are the most frequently cited journals in the field of tourism education teaching methods. Findings as such suggest that studies on tourism pedagogies were mainly published in those journals. The primary research facet centre on teaching methods and evaluation criteria adopted for assessing the quality of tourism education (see Airey and Ruhanen, 2014; Daniel et al., 2017; Cotterell et al., 2019); followed by students’ experiences, impacts of tourism education on students’ cognition, emotion and behaviour (Arranz et al., 2017); investigations on social, economic and environmental impacts of tourism education, impacts of tourism pedagogies on knowledge dissemination and students’ capabilities, in particular teaching methods could lead to positive changes both for the future tourism workers and the tourism industry (Sharafeddin and Samarji, 2022).

Findings of the current study also sheds light on the emerging research hotspots in this field. Tourism pedagogies were found to be revolving around topics such as educational method innovation, experiential education, management and technology applications, tourism industry knowledge and practical skills. It is worthy of attention that the research topic on critical tourism pedagogies was found to be an important emergent research trend in tourism education. This emergent research domain is in line with Browning and Myers’s (2020) critical pragmatism framework. In addition, the findings show that it is becoming increasingly important to adopt an experiential learning mode which is intertwined with digital technology, and can translate theories. Keywords of this emergent research domain include critical pedagogy, education, knowledge, experience and tourism. Finding as such illuminate the fact that tourism is an ever-changing industry which requires its workers to have critical thinking and high adaptability. Future tourism workers are expected only to cope with challenges but also to lead and make changes. As evidenced in the co-occurrence analysis, critical pedagogy is a research hotspot and is regarded as a mechanism that would allow students in tourism education to develop their critical mindsets, and can better adapt to the demands and evolving trends as demanded by the tourism employment market (Hall and Smyth, 2016).

While bibliometric analysis has been conducted in tourism and hospitality education, research in pedagogies related to tourism and hospitality education has been comparatively less explored. This study provides an overview of the current literature related to tourism pedagogies and highlighted the changing research focus and the emergent research hotspots. Findings provide directions to help future researchers to do research in topics that are current and have future potential for good publications.

In addition, this study provides a comparison between traditional and contemporary pedagogical methods used in tourism and hospitality education. Findings serve as an additional complement of previous research. While earlier studies have typically focused on either adopting traditional classroom-based teaching or online education, this study provides a juxtaposition of these methodologies. It delves into the integration of innovative technologies into tourism and hospitality education, such as “technology-enhanced learning”, “real-life simulation”, “situational case-based teaching”, “interdisciplinary-projects”, interactive case-sharing and discussions. All these are the pedagogies used in contemporary education in tourism and hospitality studies with an aim to enhance students’ practical and problem-solving skills. Such a research facet has been less explicitly emphasized in prior studies. Critical tourism pedagogy in particular is found to be influential when enhancing students’ critical thinking and the awareness of global citizenship is emphasized. Findings are in line with Kim and Davies’ (2014) study that more innovative teaching practice should be adopted to help facilitate students’ ability to think critically and creatively. To think critically and creatively appear to be the qualities wanted by the industry employers as well as the stakeholders in a society (McKercher et al., 2023). The identified changing structure of knowledge in pedagogies also opens a future research avenue for scholars to assess the role of critical tourism pedagogies and the impacts of how successful the students are mentored on the path of developing critical thinking and practice.

Pedagogies in tourism education has been evolved due to the popularity of online education and AI-intervention, in particular, a large amount of research was undertaken to investigate how teaching methods could be revolutionized when online education and AI-intervention appear to be indispensable in the contemporary world (Kim and Jeong, 2018; Ye and Law, 2021). Empirical inquiries in future could investigate the differences before and after the transformation by putting AI-intervention in tourism pedagogies under scrutiny and see how the evolution would take place and affect the outcomes generated.

Similar to other studies, this study also has its limitations. Firstly, the sample of this study only includes papers retrieved from the WoS database. Future research should combine other databases, such as Scopus and other databases, as some research on tourism education teaching methods may be included in other databases. Secondly, this study did not compare the differences in the development of tourism education teaching methods before and after COVID-19. Future research might wish to systematically investigate.

All authors acknowledge the support of Macao Polytechnic University (RP/FCHS-02/2022).