Mapping the Evolution of Crisis Management in Tourism: A Bibliometric Analysis of Scopus-Indexed Literature Using RStudio

Abstract

Crisis and disaster events, from terrorism and natural hazards to the COVID-19 pandemic, have become a defining concern of tourism research over the past two decades. This study presents a bibliometric analysis of the crisis-management-and-tourism literature indexed in Scopus, using a bibliometrix/R science-mapping workflow together with document-level evidence reconstructed from the underlying export. The corpus comprises 1,931 documents (1982-2026, plus one 2027 in-press record) drawn from 705 sources, involving 4,261 authors, and averaging 31.45 citations per document. Annual output grew from isolated contributions before the mid-1990s to a pronounced post-2020 surge; a logistic life-cycle model places the field’s inflection points at approximately 2023 and its asymptotic ceiling near 1,950 documents under current publication dynamics. Tourism Management, Current Issues in Tourism and Annals of Tourism Research anchor the source landscape, while Ritchie, Pennington-Gray, Hall and Prideaux lead individual productivity; authorship follows Lotka’s inverse-square distribution closely. Keyword co-occurrence and thematic-mapping procedures (Louvain clustering on merged author and index keywords) identify five thematic clusters - crisis, crisis management, tourism, tourism management, and sustainability - with crisis communication, resilience, and destination recovery among the most active post-2020 topics. International collaboration remains moderate (26.8% of documents), concentrated among China, the United States, Australia, Spain and the United Kingdom. The absence of cited-reference data in the export precludes co-citation and bibliographic-coupling analysis; this limitation is documented transparently rather than substituted with invented data. The study offers a reproducible, methodologically explicit map of the field’s evolution and identifies gaps around long-term recovery trajectories, non-Western destinations, and cross-crisis comparative theory.