Progress on smart tourism research

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a systematic and quantitative review of published papers on smart tourism. More specifically, the paper aims to identify the smart tourism research life cycle, collaboration trends, main social structure, disciplinary approaches and foundations, research topics and methodological approaches.

Systematic quantitative review techniques were used to review smart tourism literature. Frequency analysis, network analysis, text mining techniques were performed on data obtained from 96 papers collected from three databases as follows: Web of Science, Scopus and EBSCOhost.

The smart tourism research life cycle has two turning points with an exponential increase: 2015 and 2017. The latter is mainly associated with the internationalization of collaboration. Social structure of smart tourism research was revealed. Many of the ideas and research trends are affected by one research cluster. Destination related articles are dominant in smart tourism research. Internet of things and tourist experience are less researched areas. Only a quarter of the articles was published in tourism and hospitality journals. In particular, there is a big gap in published papers in hospitality journals. An important gap from methodological aspect is limited number of qualitative studies with human subjects. The geographical limitation is high concentration of smart tourism studies in Korea.

This study collected and analyzed only full papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Future research may consider including book chapters and/or conference proceedings. This study was mainly based on quantitative review techniques. Qualitative or mixed review techniques may be conducted.

This study is the first literature review on an increasingly popular topic of smart tourism.

本研究旨在从以下几方面探讨智慧旅游的沿革:（1）出版量和研究主题, 2）主要学科、社会结构和合作趋势, 以及3）方法论和研究范式。

本研究对1995至2017年间发表的96篇文章进行了系统的定量评价, 并采用了评价和相关回顾的方法对文献进行了分析。

研究结果阐释了智能旅游研究的生命周期。自2015以来, 相关文献的出版数量迅速增长, 2017年更是呈现出指数增长的趋势。2017年, 相关的国际合作也大幅增加。在学科重点方面, 智能旅游研究并不仅局限于旅游, 而是采用跨学科/多学科的方法。在社会结构方面, 智能旅游的知识在很大程度上是由具有相似社会文化背景和制度背景的学者建构的。在研究主题方面, 与目的地相关的文章占主导地位。在研究方法方面, 智能旅游研究采用的主要是定量研究, 其次是概念研究和混合方法研究。令人惊讶的是, 定性研究则十分有限。在研究范式方面, 由于研究样本主要来自韩国, 研究可能存在文化偏见, 。

本研究仅收集并分析了在同行评审期刊上发表的论文。未来的研究可以考虑加入书籍章节和/或会议论文。本研究主要采用定量评价, 未来的研究可以考虑可以采用定性或混合方法技术。

本研究通过对社会结构、主题、方法和研究范式等方面的研究空白的分析, 为智能旅游研究提供了有意义的理论贡献, 并指出了未来的研究方向。