Rural tourism researches: A co-citation analysis

The contributions of tourism to the economic, social, and cultural development of rural areas have been attracting the attention of researchers since 2005. Nonetheless, the scopes and intellectual structures of those studies are uncertain. Therefore, this study presents the most influential research groups, journals, and the most effective inter-research associations in the field of rural tourism within the last 20 years, employing the bibliometric mapping method. To this end, Web of Science Core Collection database was used to retrieve relevant data for the period of 2000-2020. Also, the data are limited to the English language. Articles, books, book chapters, proceedings papers were included in the analysis. Analysis of co-citation was carried out using VOSviewer.The results of the Analysis of 864 documents indicate that rural tourism studies are categorized into 5 groups. Besides Tourism Management; Annals of Tourism Research and Journal of Sustainable Tourism are the most essential journals in the related field. Moreover, Richard Sharpley, Bernard Lane, Gunjan Saxena, and Collin Michael Hall are the most influential researchers in this field. The results of the study are crucial in that they reveal the line of progress and potential areas of improvement in this field to the researchers who are interested in rural tourism.