A Review of Tourism Entrepreneurship Research Based on Bibliometric Methods

Entrepreneurship plays an indispensable role in the development of the tourism industry. For one thing, the great market potential brought by the robust growth of the tourism industry calls for the involvement of entrepreneurial activities to continuously create economic and social value. For another, the need for differentiation in the tourism industry to increase competitiveness and maintain a sustainable development requires the entrepreneurship to exert its innovative ability. Besides, in times of crisis caused by COVID-19, it is paramount for entrepreneurship to make a contribution to promoting economic recovery and revitalising the tourism industry. Hence, due to the significance of entrepreneurship to the tourism industry, this dissertation attempts to conduct a comprehensive and objective review of past tourism entrepreneurship literature with the aim of discovering knowledge evolution, exploring scholarly collaboration network and mapping intellectual domains. By performing co-occurrence analysis, co-authorship analysis and co-citation analysis with the help of bibliometric software CiteSpace, this dissertation maps the existing theory and practice in the tourism entrepreneurship field and therefore points out research gaps for future research opportunities and provides guidance for the development of the tourism industry