Sustainable tourism and sustainable development objectives: evaluative and relational bibliometric perspective in the 2015-2020 period

Abstract

The article aimed to analyze the international scientific production of sustainable tourism within the perspective of the Sustainable Development Goals - SDGs, to understand the characteristics of scientific publications. The methodology used was the qualitative, exploratory-descriptive approach, or the procedure composed in analyzes of articles as themes of Sustainable Tourism and SDGs, from the Web of Science database, covering the period from 2015 to 2020, with the keyword- key used 'Sustainable tourism'; 'sustainable development objectives', two filtering steps were performed. In the first, choose to keep articles and analysis as types of documents and, in the second, proceed with the exclusion of research areas outside the scope of the subject under study, totaling, in the end, 232 articles. One step to follow, to assess the publication's performance, research areas, journals, countries, language, authors and citation number. The use of the VosViewer software enabled the organization of groups (cluster) based on cocitation and as networks of co-occurrences of keywords, from a qualitative perspective. As a result, use research on this topic and find an early stage of the discussion, with an increase in the volume of articles published in the period from 2015 to 2020. The most prominent terms will be displayed around the keywords of sustainable tourism, tourism, sustainable development, and sustainable development objectives, that is, as listed as the focus of the study. Regarding the co-authorship cluster, the results pointed to numbered formations of groups of authors (206) although, the dispersion in the networks is noticeable, apparently signaling the youthfulness of the SDG theme.