Community-based tourism research in academic journals: A numerical analysis

Abstract

This article examines the growth of Community-Based Tourism within the broader discipline of tourism. New topics in the field have emerged such as responsible tourism, pro-poor tourism, sports tourism and moral impacts of tourism. This phenomenon also reflects the multidisciplinarity of tourism. In this article, using the Title, Abstract and Keywords (TAK) for instances in which the words (Community-based Tourism, Community Tourism and Community-Based Eco-Tourism) to subsume Community-Based Tourism (CBT), a search was made in various databases and found that CBT as a sub-specialty of tourism started to emerge in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The number of articles published specifically on CBT has been growing phenomenally. The major contribution of this article is that we now know the evolution of CBT and we also now know its trajectory of growth which has been upward. While the number of articles on CBT is growing, there is no journal dedicated solely to CBT.

Keywords: Tourism; community tourism; ecotourism; tourism research.