A Bibliometric Study on Tourism and its Relation to the Covid-19 Pandemic during 2020 to 2021

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the economic activities of the tourism sector ever since the global pandemic was announced in March 2020 by the World Health Organization. This paper examines research articles specifically relating to tourism and Covid-19 from the announcement of the pandemic by conducting a bibliometric analysis to extract the research focus and areas of interest for the tourism sector during the nascent phase pandemic. It also examines the main authors, highest number of publications and co-occurrences of keywords to bring out themes of the research articles. It uses VOSviewer analysis to evaluate the data in the form of a cluster analysis. A total of 542 authors were identified in the 178 articles published in 7 tourism journals.  The results of the study find a cluster of keywords in the form of business, intentions, employee and destinations that are correlated in tourism and Covid-19 studies. Themes such as trust, innovation, employee welfare, psychological faculties, conflicts, anxiety during pandemic and ways to meet the possible hurdles in post-Covid are found to be predominantly studied and most of the articles were published in 2021.  Despite the limited time frame of the study, the results are relevant to understanding the negative impact of the pandemic on the tourism industry.