Journal of Sustainable Tourism

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Climate change and tourism: a scientometric

analysis using CiteSpace

Yan Fang, Jie Yin & Bihu Wu

To cite this article: Yan Fang, Jie Yin & Bihu Wu (2018) Climate change and tourism: a
scientometric analysis using CiteSpace, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 26:1, 108-126, DOI:
10.1080/09669582.2017.1329310

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JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM, 2018
VOL. 26, NO. 1, 108–126
https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2017.1329310

Climate change and tourism: a scientometric analysis using

CiteSpace
Yan Fanga, Jie Yinb and Bihu Wua
a
International Center for Recreation and Tourism Research, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking
University, Beijing, China; bSchool of Geographic Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The interaction between climate change and tourism has been one of the Received 22 July 2016
most critical and dynamic research areas in the field of sustainable tourism Accepted 13 April 2017
in recent years. In this paper, a scientometric analysis of 976 academic KEYWORDS
publications between 1990 and 2015 related to climate change and Climate change; tourism;
tourism is presented to characterize the intellectual landscape by scientometrics; CiteSpace
identifying and visualizing the evolution of the collaboration network, the
co-citation network, and emerging trends. The results show that the
number of publications in this field has increased rapidly and it has
become an increasingly interdisciplinary research subject. The most
productive authors and institutions in this subject area are in Australia,
USA, Canada, New Zealand, and European countries. In this paper, we
identify the most pressing topics of climate change and tourism research,
as represented in the existing literature, which include the consequences
of climate change for tourism, necessary adaptations, the vulnerability of
the tourism industry, tourist behaviour and demand in response to climate
change, and emission reductions in the tourism sector. The paper presents
an in-depth analysis of climate change and tourism research to better
understand global trends and directions in this field that have emerged
over the past 25 years.

Introduction
Compelling evidence shows that the global climate is changing rapidly. According to the Fifth Assess-
ment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the average tempera-
ture will increase 1  C»3.7  C by the end of the twenty-first century due to the anthropogenic
greenhouse effect (IPCC, 2013). Tourism, as one of the world’s fastest growing industries involving
many aspects, is particularly sensitive to climate change because of its close connections to the envi-
ronment and climate. For example, climate has a direct impact on the resources available for tourism
and its participants (e.g. perception of weather, thermal comfort, and safety). The importance of the
tourism sector in the IPCC assessments, therefore, has evolved since the First Report in 1990, and was
strengthened in the recent Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC, 2014), particularly with respect to the rec-
ognition of transboundary impacts, the sector’s contribution to climate change, and its mitigation
requirements (Scott, Hall, & Go €ssling, 2016). Addressing climate change is arguably one of the most
pressing issues facing the tourism industry and its stakeholders, and the volume of relevant literature
is growing rapidly.

CONTACT Bihu Wu tigerwu@urban.pku.edu.cn

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM 109

Against this background, several studies have made progress in the profiling of literature on cli-
mate change and tourism. Various angles have been presented in these analyses, including the rela-
tionship between climate, weather, and tourism (Martın, 2005); tourist perceptions and reactions to
the impacts of climate change (Go €ssling, Scott, Hall, Ceron, & Dubois, 2012); quantitative approaches
to evaluating the effects of climate change on tourism (Rossello -Nadal, 2014); comprehensive reviews
of tourism and climate change (Becken, 2013). Most, however, are expert-dependent and to a certain
degree this subjectivity and individual preference leads to a lack of bibliometric quantitative analysis
in this field (e.g. word frequency analysis, authorship analysis, citation analysis, co-citation analysis,
co-occurrence analysis). Despite a wide range of publications related to climate change and tourism,
little is actually known about the overall structure of its intellectual landscape.
Mapping knowledge domain – a newly evolving interdisciplinary area of science – is aimed at the
process of charting, mining, analysing, sorting, and displaying knowledge (Shiffrin & Bo €rner, 2004).
Domain visualization has drawn a great deal of attention because of various visualization tools which
enable domain analysis for science and technology management (Boyack, Wylie, & Davidson, 2002).
Compared with other visualization tools, CiteSpace – a java application including bibliometric analy-
sis, data mining algorithms and visualization methods developed by Chen (2004) – improves the clar-
ity and interpretability of visualizations, which helps users reduce cognitive burden to find vital
trends and pivotal points in a knowledge structure (Chen, 2006). It has been widely used for describ-
ing the visualizations of mass-extinction (Chen, 2006), identifying emerging trends of regenerative
medicine (Chen, Hu, Liu, & Tseng, 2012), obtaining visualization in terahertz technology (Liu, 2013),
showing the intellectual landscape and detecting emerging topics of orphan drugs and rare diseases
(Chen, Dubin, & Kim, 2014), presenting analyses on rural studies of human geography (Wang & Liu,
2014), exploring the GIS knowledge domain (Wei, Grubesic, & Bishop, 2015).
Despite the popularity of CiteSpace, to our best knowledge, no attempt has been made to use
CiteSpace to analyse the rapidly expanding climate change and tourism literature. In order to provide
a systemic and objective overview of research on climate change and tourism, this study identifies
bibliometric characteristics and visualizes relationships of articles in this field published in the jour-
nals of Web of Science (WoS) between 1990 and 2015 by means of a scientometric analysis based on
CiteSpace. Specifically, the research is guided by four key goals: (1) to understand the characteristics
of research collaboration in the climate change and tourism field; (2) to identify the most cited schol-
ars, inscriptions, and journals in the field; (3) to illustrate the major knowledge groups and their evolu-
tion in the field over the decades; (4) to detect emerging topics of climate change and tourism
research over the decades. It empirically complements the traditional narrative-based literature
reviews that are typically qualitative and largely based on personal judgment and interpretation. The
remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The “Materials and methodology” section describes
data collection and CiteSpace. The “Results” section presents a comprehensive analysis of research
outputs and their categories: the collaboration network (e.g. country, institution, and author), the co-
citation network (e.g. article, author, and journal), and the emerging trends. Finally, the “Conclusion”
section concludes the key findings and suggests future research direction, demonstrating the broad
applicability of this work.

Materials and methodology

Data collection
There are two steps in collecting data for CiteSpace analysis. The first step is to select a reputable and
comprehensive bibliographic database that gives wide-ranging access to high quality refereed jour-
nal articles as reliable sources of knowledge. The publications selected for this study were identified
in WoS. Thomson Reuters’s WoS – including the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED),
the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) databases –
covers approximately 12,000 leading journals worldwide and provides powerful access to
110 Y. FANG ET AL.

bibliographic information and citation information pertaining to research articles published, which is
considered to be an ideal data source for bibliometric investigations (Van Leeuwen, 2006).
Another step is to use appropriate keywords to select articles from a bibliographic database and
special attention should be paid to the validity and representativeness of keywords, with checks per-
formed to assess the relevance of each study returned. 1158 papers related to climate change and
tourism were published between 1990 and 2015 by a topic search using the terms “climate change”
and “tourism” in titles, abstracts, or indexing terms. It should be underlined that search parameters
may not select all the related publications as limited keywords might lead to missed items. In order
to eliminate “noise” in the database, the data-set was reduced to 976 records limited to articles and
reviews after filtering out some record types (e.g. editorial material, proceedings papers). The period
(1990–2015) is selected for two major reasons. First, the importance of the tourism sector in the IPCC
assessments has evolved since the First Report in 1990. Besides, earlier publications were not avail-
able for certain journals in WoS.

CiteSpace
CiteSpace is a scientometric software that can be used to generate knowledge domain visualiza-
tion. It has improved the clarity and interpretability of visualizations with a variety of visual ana-
lytic functions compared to earlier visualization tools (Chen, 2006). Specifically, it can be used to
identify intellectual basis, landmarks, hotspots, emerging trends, and pivotal points of various
papers in a group. Eight different visualization graphs can be generated by CiteSpace to repre-
sent the patterns of scientific literature. Users can specify the time period of the literature, choose
the nodes, and set up thresholds all in the same screen. Nodes and links are the building blocks
of CiteSpace visualization graphs. The types of nodes include authors, institutions, countries,
terms, keywords, categories, cited authors, cited references, cited journals, grants and papers.
The concentric circles of different colours in a node denote papers in various time slices. In addi-
tion, various relationships of the underlying network can also be represented by the links. For
example, the colour of a link represents the year of the first relationship established between
two nodes (e.g. the year in which two authors first cooperated in terms of the author collabora-
tion network), the thickness of a link shows the strength of connection between two nodes (e.g.
with regard to journal co-citation network the thicker the connection between two nodes, the
higher the journal co-citation count).

Collaboration analysis
Scientific collaboration has increasing in frequency and importance in recent years, which has the
potential to solve complex scientific problems, promote various agendas (e.g. political, economic,
and social agendas), and knowledge creation (Sonnenwald, 2007). Collaboration analysis is critical to
understand scholarly communication and knowledge diffusion (Chen, 2006). Each bibliographic
record analysed by CiteSpace contains its title, abstract, and authors with addresses (Chen, Zhu, Tom-
aszewski, & MacEachren, 2007). These authors are called co-authors and co-authorship indicates a
collaborative relationship between co-authors. For example, a record shows that a 2010 article, enti-
tled “Adapting to climate change and climate policy: progress, problems and potentials”, has co-authors
from the two institutions (Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of
Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada; Environment, Society and Design Division, Lincoln University,
Christchurch, New Zealand). In this case, Canada and New Zealand would be connected by lines in
the country collaboration network. In this study, the collaboration analysis focuses on identifying the
research community and principal countries/institutes/authors in climate change and tourism field.
We advance a dynamic structure for the contributing research community, which can serve as a use-
ful guide for new researchers as well as for those seeking potential cooperation and reviewers in mul-
tidisciplinary research area-climate change and tourism.
 JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM 111

Co-citation analysis
Co-citation is defined as the frequency with which two items of earlier literature are cited together by
the later literature (Small, 1973). It is a useful tool for mapping the intellectual structure of science as
co-citation patterns viewed over a period of years can provide clues to understanding the mecha-
nism of specialty development. Besides, co-citation analysis is more reliable to provide important
insights into knowledge domains compared with citation-only analysis because it would risk exclud-
ing articles that hold promise (Mustafee, Katsaliaki, & Fishwick, 2014).
The co-citation network of a subject is first derived using graph-theoretical approaches as imple-
mented in CiteSpace (Chen, 2004). Network nodes are subsequently clustered by using the expecta-
tion maximization algorithm based on a series of attributes, including citation frequency,
betweenness centrality (BC), the first author of the article, the year of publication, the source of the
publication, and the half-life of the article (Chen, 2004; Dempster, Laird, & Rubin, 1977). BC is a metric
of a node that measures how likely an arbitrary shortest path in a network will go through the node,
which shows contribution of a node to make connections with other nodes in a network. The half-life
of an article is defined as the number of years that over 50% of the total citations were made during
these years since its publication. This is intended to measure the development of a research front.
The Document Co-citation Network (DCN), Author Co-citation Network (ACN) and Journal Co-citation
Network (JCN) are generated in this study to explore the underlying clusters that have high article
co-citation counts associated with them as well as the most cited works/authors/journals to find the
most influential points (based on the co-citations they received) in the knowledge structure.

Keyword co-occurrence analysis

The analysis of keyword co-occurrence is an effective way to show emerging trends and track topics
of research over time because keywords provide a concise and precise high-level summarization of a
document. The changes in research topics have become an important research issue, which can help
researchers to gain deeper insights into the development of a particular research field. Keyword co-
occurrence analysis based on CiteSpace contains two main procedures: one is to extract the key-
words, then separate and classify them in order to calculate the frequency; the other is to acquire
keyword co-occurrence matrix used for analysis of keyword co-occurrence (Chen, 2004; Chen, 2006).
The technique of keyword co-occurrence analysis is used in this paper to monitor development
trends in the field of climate change and tourism and project future research directions.

Results
Research outputs and their categories
The progression of papers published related to climate change and tourism during the 25 year period
1990–2015 is shown in Figure 1. A clear upward trend over time can be observed, indicating the
increased role of scientific research in climate change and tourism. According to the growth curve of
climate change and tourism research, three stages can be identified as follows:
(1) Preparation phase (1990–1997). The annual number of published articles prior to 1998 was
below five and increased slowly. Although some researchers claimed that climate change could
cause a significant impact on tourism (El-Raey, Fouda, & Nasr, 1997; Gable, Aubrey, & Gentile, 1991),
most articles presented an extensive analysis of the climate change challenge rather than deep analy-
sis with a focus on climate change and tourism.
(2) Development phase (1998–2006). By this stage, some books and reports of climate change and
tourism had been produced (e.g. Ko €nig, 1998; Viner & Agnew, 1999) and many foundational theories
and empirical research on climate change and tourism had been put forward. In addition, the “First
International Conference on Climate Change and Tourism” was held in 2003, contributing to the
growth of research outputs. The number of articles increased more rapidly than before, and more
than 80 articles were published during this period.
112 Y. FANG ET AL.

Figure 1. The number of published papers on climate change and tourism (1990–2015).

(3) Rapid development phase (2007–2015). Since 2007, climate change and tourism issues have
become one of the most significant concerns among policy-makers, related scientists, international
organizations, and national organizations. The “Second International Conference on Climate Change
and Tourism” organized by The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) in 2007
emphasized the importance of an adaptive response to climate change which was seen as the most
serious threat factor to sustainable tourism development. Moreover, World Tourism Day 2008 was
hosted in Lima, which focused on the tourism sector’s constructive response to the challenge of cli-
mate change. The number of papers, as a result, has grown rapidly since 2007, with a growth rate of
85.71% compared to the figure in 2006.
All the articles covered one of 85 ISI identified subject categories in the WoS. The top 10 subject
categories are showed in Figure 2, including environmental sciences (305 articles; accounting for
31.37% of the total); hospitality leisure sport tourism (232; 23.87%); environmental studies (178;

Figure 2. Annual article output in the top 10 subject categories.

 JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM 113

18.31%); meteorology atmospheric sciences (111; 11.52%); ecology (77; 7.92%); geography (70; 7.2%);
multidisciplinary geosciences (68; 6.7%); physical geography (59; 6.07%); water resources (55; 5.66%);
and management (53; 5.45%). The distribution of subject categories suggested the high priority of
environmental, geographical, atmospheric, and ecological issues in the field. Moreover, climate
change and tourism research became more interdisciplinary over time. Multidisciplinary geosciences
made a greater contribution at first; environmental sciences and environmental studies then became
greater contributors to this field. It is particularly noticeable that hospitality leisure sport tourism has
played an important role in recent years.

The collaboration network of climate change and tourism research

Country collaboration network
The network of collaborating countries consisted of 77 nodes and 56 links between 1990 and 2015
(Figure 3), and the 10 countries which made the major portion of contributions of the total outputs
are presented in Table 1. Australia is the largest contributor, publishing 138 papers, followed by the
USA (115). One prominent node in Asia is China (36), ranking 10th in terms of publication counts. The
number of publications from Canada is 61 and the country ranks sixth. In general, the number of out-
puts is associated with the number of research institutions, availability of research funding, and the
proportion of those that have an environmental and/or tourism focus. Another obvious reason for
high research outputs is that some countries are identified as at-risk tourism destinations, such as
Australia and New Zealand, due to various regional manifestations of climate change (Simpson,
Go€ssling, Scott, Hall, & Gladin, 2008). Moreover, European countries play a crucial role in making con-
nections with other countries according to their high BC, including England (0.23), Germany (0.21),
and the Netherlands (0.23). In terms of the lines’ colours, the cooperative relationships among the 10
countries have mainly been established during the twenty-first century, while the cooperative rela-
tionship between Germany and the Netherlands was established in the 1990s. In addition, the thin-
ness of the links between countries implies a low level of cooperation.

Institution collaboration network

The institution collaboration network consisted of 252 institutions and 98 collaboration links between
1990 and 2015 and is shown in Figure 4. The relatively low maturity of the research community is
indicated according to the relatively loose structure and fewer close relationships. The top 20 institu-
tions that made the majority of contributions to the total outputs are presented in Table 2. Griffith

Figure 3. A visualization of the country collaboration network.

114 Y. FANG ET AL.

Table 1. Top 10 countries based on frequency.

Country Frequency BC Country Frequency BC
Australia 138 0.12 Canada 61 0.16
USA 115 0.14 Switzerland 44 0.07
England 96 0.23 Netherlands 44 0.23
Germany 89 0.21 New Zealand 43 0.08
Spain 76 0.07 China 36 0.03
Note: Betweenness centralities (BC): a metric of a node measures how likely an arbitrary shortest path in a network will go
through the node, which shows contribution of a node to make connections with other nodes in a network.

Figure 4. A visualization of the institution collaboration network.

Table 2. Top 20 institutions based on frequency.

Institution Country Frequency Institution Country Frequency
Griffith University Australia 33 University of Illes Balears Spain 13
James Cook University Australia 26 Chinese Academy of Sciences China 12
University of Waterloo Canada 23 Bournemouth University UK 12
University of Oulu Finland 21 NHTV Breda University of Applied Netherlands 11
Sciences
University of Canterbury New Zealand 17 University of Innsbruck Austria 10
University of Freiburg Germany 16 Linnaeus University Sweden 10
University of East Anglia UK 14 Vrije University, Amsterdam Netherlands 9
University of Queensland Australia 14 University of Exeter UK 9
University of Otago New Zealand 14 University of Victoria Australia 9
The Hong Kong Polytechnic China 13 University of Munich Germany 9
University

University tops the list with 33 publications and the other institutions with a high number of publica-
tions are James Cook University (26), University of Waterloo (23), University of Oulu (21), University of
Canterbury (17). It can be seen that Australia is the largest contributor in climate change and tourism
research with 4 institutions (Griffith University, James Cook University, University of Queensland, Uni-
versity of Victoria, ranking 1, 2, 8, 19, respectively). University of Otago and University of Canterbury
are situated in New Zealand and, moreover, established a cooperative relationship around 1996 while
other institutions started after 2008 according to the colour of the links.
 JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM 115

Figure 5. A visualization of the author collaboration network.

Table 3. Top 10 authors based on frequency.

Author Frequency Institution
D. Scott 31 Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo
S. G€ossling 22 Department of Service Management, Linnaeus University; School of Business and Economics,
Lund University
C.M. Hall 20 Department of Management, Marketing, and Entrepreneurship, University of Canterbury
S. Becken 17 Griffith Institute for Tourism, Griffith University
A. Matzarakis 16 Department of Geology and Geo-environment, University of Athens
P. Peeters 15 Centre for Sustainable Tourism and Transport, NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences
J. Saarinen 12 Department of Geography, University of Oulu
R. Steiger 11 Institute of Public Finance, Institute of Geography, University of Innsbruck
J.E.S. Higham 11 Department of Tourism, University of Otago
B. Amelung 11 Environmental Systems Analysis Group, Wageningen University

Author collaboration network

The author collaboration network which contributes to climate change and tourism research con-
sisted of 419 authors and 643 collaboration links and is presented in Figure 5. The network has a large
number of participants as well as a wide range of collaborations and shows the interdisciplinary
nature of climate change and tourism research. Scott, evidently, is the most frequent contributing
author to the field of climate change and tourism; he has worked on the human dimensions of cli-
mate change for over 15 years and was an expert reviewer for the IPCC Third, Fourth, and Fifth assess-
ments reports. Furthermore, three major authors (Scott, Go €ssling, & Hall, 2012) developed
a closer relationship since 2010. Wide-ranging partnerships developed around 2014, as shown by the
many red coloured links between these authors. As far as the department/faculty is concerned
(Table 3), most of the authors in the top 10 list are affiliated with the department/faculty related to
the environment, geography, or tourism and management, which is consistent with the climate
change and tourism research output categories in Figure 2.

The co-citation network of climate change and tourism research

Document co-citation network (DCN)
Figure 6 shows the DCN which consisted of 840 references cited and 2882 co-citation links between
1990 and 2015. This was generated by CiteSpace, using title terms and a log-likelihood ratio (LLR)
weighting algorithm to label the clusters. LLR is an algorithm to calculate and determine each type
of labels, which presents core concept of each cluster with professional words. As an indicator of
homogeneity or consistency to measure the quality of a cluster, the silhouette score of the largest 20
116 Y. FANG ET AL.

Figure 6. A visualization of the document co-citation network.

clusters are all above 0.8, suggesting a reliable quality due to their closeness to the highest value of
1.00 (Table 4). The largest cluster – #0 winter tourism – contains 49 member references that is a little
larger than other clusters. Based on the mean cite year for each cluster, the majority of clusters are
relatively new clusters, while #16 snow-cover duration is an older issue.

Table 4. Summary of the largest 20 clusters.

Cluster ID Size Silhouette score Label (LLR) Mean (Cite year)
0 49 0.868 Winter tourism 2007
1 42 0.832 Weather-resolving index 2005
2 40 0.857 Destination marketing 2009
3 38 0.825 Consumer behaviour 2007
4 30 0.884 Sustainable tourism 2007
5 24 0.928 Marine tourism 2006
6 20 0.982 Keystone habitat 2005
7 12 1 Geographic reflection 1999
8 10 1 Coastal visitor number 2002
9 7 1 International tourism 2000
10 7 1 Present day 2005
11 6 1 Anthropogenic pressure 1997
12 6 0.953 Black forest 2005
13 5 0.993 Tourism research 2011
14 4 1 Geographical analysis 1997
15 4 0.987 Canadian rocky 2001
mountain
16 4 1 Snow-cover duration 1991
17 3 1 Local knowledge holder 2002
18 2 1 Social ramification 2007
19 2 1 Barcelona hotel industry 2010
Size: the number of references that a cluster contains.
 JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM 117

Table 5. Top 10 most cited papers with co-citation frequency.

Citation counts References Cluster
73 Scott et al. (2003) 0
56 Amelung et al. (2007) 1
48 Scott and McBoyle (2007) 0
46 Hamilton et al. (2005) 1
46 G€ossling et al. (2012) 2
44 Becken (2007) 4
43 Scott et al. (2006) 0
42 Scott et al. (2010) 2
42 G€ossling and Hall (2006) 1
41 Scott et al. (2007) 0

The most cited articles are usually regarded as landmarks due to their ground-breaking contribu-
tions (Chen et al., 2012). Table 5 shows the top 10 most cited papers with co-citation frequency of
over 41 times. Four, three, and two papers in the top 10 landmarks are from cluster #0, #1, and #2,
respectively, while #4 has only one paper. Scott, McBoyle, and Mills (2003) paper entitled “Climate
change and the skiing industry in southern Ontario (Canada): Exploring the importance of snowmaking
as a technical adaptation”, is the most cited article in our data-set with 73 citations. This article meas-
ures how current and improved snowmaking capacity affects the vulnerability of the ski industry in
the southern Ontario (Canada), revealing that snowmaking and other adaptation strategies should
be considered when assessing the vulnerability of the ski industry and winter tourism to climate
change. That kind of change conforms to the concept defined by the IPCC, that vulnerability is a func-
tion of the character, magnitude, and rate of climate variation to which a system is exposed, its sensi-
tivity, and its adaptive capacity (IPCC, 2007). The other articles from #0 are also published by Scott,
McBoyle, Minogue, and Mills (2006), Scott and McBoyle (2007), and Scott, McBoyle and Minogue
(2007), suggesting that he has inspired an intense interest in winter tourism and made great contri-
butions to this field. Amelung, Nicholls, and Viner (2007), Hamilton, Maddison, and Tol (2005), and
Go€ssling and Hall (2006), at the second, fourth, and ninth position, respectively, are from #1 and focus
on the implications of climate change for tourism using weather-related indices. Amelung et al.
(2007), for example, adopts the Tourism Climatic Index to assess the potential impacts of projected
climate change on the global tourism industry. Go €ssling et al., 2012 and Scott, Peeters, and Go €ssling
(2010) from #2 focus on destination marketing, while Becken (2007) – the only one from #4 – has 44
citations and explores potential policies to realize sustainable tourism by reducing air travel’s contri-
bution to climate change.

Author co-citation network

The findings in this section are to show frequently cited authors. It should be pointed out that in this
analysis all the publications of a particular author are combined into one, which means only the first
author is considered. The merged author co-citation network that contributes to climate change and
tourism literature is shown in Figure 7, which contains 731 nodes and 2482 co-citation links. The top
cited author is Scott and IPCC is a key node in the network due to high BC that is a measure associ-
ated with the transformative potential of a scientific contribution. To be succinct, IPCC tends to
bridge different stages of the development of climate change and tourism field. Table 6 lists the top
10 authors with a citation frequency greater than 70. Comparing Table 6 with the authors listed in
the Table 3, a highly consistent correlation is observed between the top 10 most cited authors and
the top 10 most productive authors.

Journal co-citation network

In order to outline the set of journals that have served the climate change and tourism research com-
munity over the last 25 years, the co-citation network at journal level is shown in Figure 8. In total, 535
different publications were found, illustrating a diverse body of knowledge which influences studies of
118 Y. FANG ET AL.

Figure 7. A visualization of the author co-citation network.

Table 6. Top 10 most cited authors with co-citation frequency.

Author Frequency BC Author Frequency BC
D. Scott 291 0.05 J,M Hamilton 97 0.02
S. G€ossling 212 0.07 C.M. Hall 90 0.02
S. Becken 178 0.08 UNWTO 85 0.00
IPCC 152 0.42 H. Elsasser 73 0.04
B. Amelung 101 0.02 P. Peeters 70 0.03

Figure 8. A visualization of the journal co-citation network.

 JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM 119

Table 7. Top 10 most cited journals with co-citation frequency.

Journal Frequency BC Impact factor
Tourism Management 344 0.06 3.762
Climatic Change 340 0.19 4.610
Global Environmental Change Human and Policy Dimensions 316 0.03 7.784
Journal of Sustainable Tourism 264 0.03 3.230
Science 263 0.26 35.263
Annals of Tourism Research 255 0.09 3.467
Nature 208 0.16 41.296
Climate Research 184 0.10 3.402
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 175 0.02 10.563
Ecological Economics 173 0.08 3.929
Impact factor: average impact factor (5 years).

Table 8. Top 10 most prolific journals.

Journal TA TA% Impact factor
Journal of Sustainable Tourism 73 7.51 3.230
Tourism Management 48 4.94 3.762
Climatic Change 29 2.98 4.610
Climate Research 22 2.26 3.402
Ocean Coastal Management 17 1.75 2.000
Journal of Coastal Research 16 1.65 0.961
Regional Environmental Change 16 1.60 2.946
Current Issues in Tourism 15 1.54 1.485
Tourism Geographies 15 1.54 1.647
Annals of Tourism Research 14 1.44 3.467
TA: total number of articles; TA%: the percentage in the 976 articles; impact factor: average impact factor (5 years).

climate change and tourism. Ten journal sets with co-citation frequencies of over 173 are listed in
Table 7. Tourism Management is most prominent with 344 co-citations, followed by Climatic Change
(340), and Global Environment Change (316), respectively. As observed, this confirms that journals with
high impact factors may have higher quotation frequencies. In addition, top academic journals publish-
ing original research across a wide range of scientific fields are included, such as Science and Nature. In
terms of BC, Science has the highest BC ratio (0.26) and papers which appear in it have been cited since
1993. Other journals with high relative BC ratios are Climatic Change (0.19), Nature (0.16), and Climate
Research (0.10). These four journals, therefore, are core nodes that make connections to other nodes in
the journal co-citation network of climate change and tourism research.
In terms of the most prolific journals in climate change and tourism research (Table 8), the Journal
of Sustainable Tourism is the leading specialist journal in climate change and tourism research and
published 73 articles during the period of 1990–2015. The second most prolific journals are Tourism
Management (48), followed by Climatic Change (29), Climate Research (22), and Ocean Coastal Man-
agement (17). As shown in Tables 7 and 8, the most prolific journals in climate change and tourism
research do not necessarily have a bigger impact and are not cited more frequently; however, jour-
nals with higher effective factors may have higher co-citation frequency.

Emerging trends of climate change and tourism research

References with citation bursts
Citation bursts, which refer to articles that have received sharp increases in citations, can in part
reflect the dynamics of a field. The top 10 references with the strongest citation bursts are shown in
Table 9. As observed, the earliest citation burst started in 2007, which is consistent with the rapid
development phase (2007–2015) of climate change and tourism research, as stated previously. From
120 Y. FANG ET AL.

Table 9. Top 10 references with strongest citation bursts.

References Strength Begin End 1990–2015
IPCC (2007) 4.5841 2007 2011
Elsasser and Messerli (2001) 4.6266 2009 2011
UNWTO-UNEP-WMO (2008) 4.3288 2010 2013
Steiger (2010) 4.2951 2012 2015
G€ossling et al. (2012) 11.3362 2013 2015
McKercher et al. (2010) 6.2491 2013 2015
Hares et al. (2010) 4.1843 2013 2015
Scott et al. (2012) 6.1277 2014 2015
Dawson and Scott (2013) 5.3319 2014 2015
Kajan and Saarinen (2013) 4.5091 2014 2015
Note: The rectangles in the last column depict the 25 year period 1990–2015 and their dark blue colour represents the years
that articles have received slight increases in citations while red shows citations rise dramatically.

2007 to 2015, researchers focused on studying the consequences of climate change for tourism
(Scott et al., 2012); developing the necessary adaptation to potential changes (Kajan & Saarinen,
2013); assessing the vulnerability of the snow industry (Dawson & Scott, 2013; Elsasser & Messerli,
2001; Steiger, 2010); understanding consumer behaviour and demand in response to climate change
€ssling et al., 2012); and achieving emission reductions in tourism (Hares, Dickinson, & Wilkes,
(Go
2010; McKercher, Prideaux, Cheung & Law, 2010).

Keyword analysis
In order to explore research direction more intensely, a time zone view of keywords is illustrated in
Figure 9 and this visualization view arranges keywords in correspondence to the time of their publi-
cation or their peak time. According to these major keywords over time, the main topics of climate
change and tourism research are synthesized below with three research streams-climate and tourism,
the impact of climate change on tourism and adaptation options, the contribution of tourism to

Figure 9. Time zone view of keywords.

 JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM 121

climate change and mitigation responses, which are in accord with previous qualitative observations
of main themes in climate change and tourism research (e.g. Becken, 2013).
(1) Climate and tourism. The relationship between climate and tourism has been extensively stud-
ied, which has built a solid foundation for climate change and tourism research. Climate is considered
to be an important factor for the location of tourism centres. For example, a warm temperate zone is
seen as an optimum area for sun, sand and sea (3S) tourism (Burton, 1995). Also, it is regarded as a
basic resource of tourism and an attraction for tourists. Climate (e.g. temperature, sun hours, snow, or
wind) is a basic resource for tourism, especially for nature-based tourism, including 3S tourism, winter
tourism, health tourism and sport tourism (Smith, 1993). Moreover, tourists perceived climate as an
important attribute when choosing a destination for leisure (Martın, 2005). Against this background,
several indices have been developed to measure climatic elements that most affect the quality of the
tourism experience, including the Tourism Climate Index (Mieczkowski, 1985), the Beach Comfort
Index (Becker, 1998; Morgan et al., 2000), the Physiologically Equivalent Temperature Index (Matzara-
kis, Mayer, & Iziomon, 1999), the Climate Index for Tourism (De Freitas, Scott, & McBoyle, 2008), and
the Modified Climate Index for Tourism (Yu, Schwartz, & Walsh, 2009). All these indices have been
widely used to assess the impacts of projected climate change on the tourism industry at a national
scale, as well as regionally and locally (e.g. Amelung et al., 2007; Fang & Yin, 2015; Moreno &
Amelung, 2009; Vitt, Gulyas, & Matzarakis, 2015).
(2) The impact of climate change on tourism and adaptation options. The implications of climate
change on tourism have been examined since 1990 (Smith, 1993) and since then many scholars have
devoted themselves to this issue (Giles & Perry, 1998; Harrison, Winterbottom, & Sheppard, 1999;
Nicholls & Hoozemans, 1996; Pendleton & Mendelsohn, 1998). In the twenty-first century, more and
more studies related to the impacts of climate change on tourism have been carried out, which has
resulted in the broadening of the scope of this field. On one hand, the direct and indirect effect of cli-
mate on tourism has been examined (e.g. changing climate conditions at places of origin and desti-
nation, influencing natural snow cover or water supply); on the other hand, consumer behaviour and
the demand response of tourists to climate change have been evaluated (e.g. tourist destination
choices, tourism flows). In order to address robust adaptation strategies, vulnerability assessment
develops and it is widely used in nature-based tourism (Moreno & Becken, 2009; Nyaupane & Chhetri,
2009; Perch-Nielsen, 2010; Scott, Dawson, & Jones, 2008). A mature vulnerability framework for the
beach tourism sector has been developed by Perch-Nielsen (2010) and includes three dimensions
(i.e. exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity) based on the IPCC’s vulnerability concept. Integra-
tion of adaptation measures have recently been adopted in impact analysis studies, investigating
how to engage tourism stakeholders (e.g. investors, insurance companies, tourism enterprises, gov-
ernments, and tourists) in climate change adaptation (Nicholls & Holecek, 2008; Turton et al., 2010).
Moreover, extreme events impacting tourism have been considered in climate change adaptation
and disaster reduction (Tsai & Chen, 2011). The challenge of climate change, clearly, is also an oppor-
tunity for tourism to become more systematic, smarter, more strategic, and more sustainable
(Becken, 2008). As a result, the issue of how to achieve sustainable tourism by focusing on climate
change has been of growing interest to researchers (Scott, 2011; Weaver, 2011).
(3) The contribution of tourism to climate change and mitigation responses. Tourism, as one of the
important global economic sectors and interconnected with many other sectors (e.g. aviation,
accommodation, retail), is an important contributor to climate change. Although tourism emissions
of CO2 were approximately 5% of the total global emissions in 2005, rapid growth is forecast for the
tourism industry, with an increase of 130% predicted from 2005 to 2035 (UNWTO-UNEP-WMO, 2008).
The composition of tourism-related emissions and energy consumption in different aspects, such as
aviation (Cohen & Higham, 2011; Dubois & Ceron, 2006; Go €ssling & Peeters, 2007; Smith & Rodger,
2009), accommodation (Bohdanowicz & Martinac, 2007), and activity (Becken & Simmons, 2002),
have been investigated to inform policymaking and management. Emissions from air travel are con-
sidered to be the main tourism contributor to global warming, which is responsible for 40% of the
total carbon emissions caused by this sector (Go €ssling, 2009). The question of whether the global
122 Y. FANG ET AL.

tourism sector can deliver on its “aspirational” greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets is
also found to be largely dependent on emissions reductions related to air travel (Scott et al., 2010). In
response to tourism’s impact on accelerating global climate change, sustained academic interest in
mitigation is demonstrated, especially in relation to aviation (e.g. Bows, Anderson, & Peeters, 2009;
Go€ssling & Upham, 2009; Sgouridis, Bonnefoy, & Hansman, 2011), and tourist behaviour (e.g.
Dillimono & Dickinson, 2015; Lassen, 2010). Compared to current trends of travelling longer distances,
shorter stays, more frequent departures, and increased flying (Ceron & Dubois, 2007), major modal
shifts in tourism transport combined with holidaying in destinations closer to home are necessary
for a lower carbon future (Dickinson, 2010). Unfortunately, the tourists’ answers as to whether or
not they would change their travel plans to reduce their impact on the global climate are ambigu-
ous, although they are environmentally aware and educated tourists (Cohen, Higham, & Cavaliere,
2011; Hares et al., 2010; McKercher et al., 2010). In addition, academic research on tourism policy
related to climate change is increasing gradually because tourism stakeholders are becoming
more involved in responding to climate change (e.g. Go €ssling, Hall, Peeters, & Scott, 2010;
Pentelow & Scott, 2011).

Conclusion
This analysis, based on CiteSpace, of bibliographic records from the field of climate change and tourism
provides a unique and interesting snapshot of the climate change and tourism knowledge domain. A
number of conclusions can be drawn from the results. First, publication data indicates strong increases
in researcher output from 1990 to 2015, especially during the last eight years. Climate change and tour-
ism research has become interdisciplinary according to the subject category distribution. Second,
research on climate change and tourism is dominated by Australia, USA, Canada, New Zealand, and
European countries, all of which have the most productive authors and institutions. European countries
play important roles in stable cooperative relationships between themselves, which have been estab-
lished gradually during the twenty-first century. Third, the most influential authors are reasonably con-
sistent with productive authors, while there is a low level conformance relationship between the most
cited journals and prolific journals. It is interesting that several environmental/atmospheric journals are
more influential than many tourism journals, indicating the multidisciplinary nature of climate change
and tourism research. Finally, three distinct research streams are identified over the decades. The first
research stream focuses on the relationship between climate and tourism, which lays the foundation
for the climate change and tourism research; the second stream addresses the impact of climate
change on tourism and adaptation options; and the third stream concentrates on the contribution of
tourism’s GHG emissions on climate change and mitigation responses. Specifically, the hot topics of cli-
mate change and tourism research in recent years are focused on studying consequences of climate
change for tourism, developing the necessary adaptation, assessing the vulnerability of tourism indus-
try, understanding tourist behaviour and demand response to climate change, and achieving emission
reductions in the tourism sector.
Although studies in this field have become more integrative and critical, there are still substantial
gaps that urgently need to be filled (Becken, 2013; Scott et al., 2016). First, research on climate
change and tourism in developing and underdeveloped countries require urgent attention, as hith-
erto research efforts in this field have almost exclusively focused on tourist destinations in Western
countries such as Australia, USA, UK, and Canada (Becken, 2013; Scott & Becken, 2010). Although
more publications can be observed in other regions (e.g. Africa, East Asia) with high impacts of cli-
mate change on tourism and relative importance of tourism to the economies (Fang, Yin, & Wu,
2016; Hoogendoorn & Fitchett, 2016), the degree of geographic concentration is high. Second,
research on tourism GHG emissions is still hampered by issues related to data (e.g. availability, com-
patibility and quality) and model (e.g. comprehensiveness, flexibility). While some researchers are
 JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM 123

addressing this gap, greater focus on emission monitoring capabilities in the tourism sector are
required to meet the need for robust and transparent data as outlined in the IPCC Fifth Assessment
Report (2014). Finally, the analysis of ethical dimensions of climate change and tourism remains a
work in progress. For instance, ethical research might be effective in achieving emissions reductions
by changing tourist behaviours from a social norms and/or responsibility perspective. However,
many travellers are compulsive in their consumption of (excessive) air travel and they choose to con-
tinue their own frequent flying behaviours despite growing awareness of the immediate and long-
term consequences of climate change (Cohen et al., 2011).
The results extend past bibliometric studies of climate change and tourism research due to the
use of scientometric software – CiteSpace – in order to offer insights into the disciplinary structure
and identify the underlying relationships by visualizing them. However, to expand on the breadth
and scope of this research, further research could be undertaken in the following areas: (1) more
articles (e.g. English and non-English language articles) related to climate change and tourism
could be analysed and the results compared with those of this research; (2) self-citation should
be accounted for/addressed using scientometric analysis tools such as Citespace to arrive at more
robust conclusions; (3) different knowledge domain visualization techniques could be combined
provide a comprehensive domain visualization map of climate and tourism research. For example,
UCINET could be used to examine various attributes of the collaboration network, such as the
average path between two nodes, clustering coefficients, and the degree of distribution; and (4)
the scientometric analysis could be limited to leading tourism journals (e.g. Annals of Tourism
Research, Journal of Travel Research, Tourism Management, Journal of Sustainable Tourism) to
understand climate change and tourism research from a focused and valuable perspective. Over-
all, different paradigms, metrics and methods should be used to explore and explain the develop-
ment of climate change and tourism field as it is a critical and dynamic research area that helps
to realize sustainable tourism.

Acknowledgments
This paper was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos: 41271151).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 41271151].

Notes on contributors
Yan Fang is working toward the PhD degree in the College of Urban and Environmental Sciences at Peking University.
Her research interests focus on climate change and tourism, and sustainable tourism.

Jie Yin is an associate professor in the School of Geographic Sciences at East China Normal University. He received the
MSc degree in physical geography from Shanghai Normal University and the PhD degree in physical geography from
East China Normal University. He is currently working on climate change and sustainable tourism development in coastal
areas.

Bihu Wu is a professor in the College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University. He received the MSc
degree in human geography from East China Normal University and the PhD degree in quaternary geology from East
China Normal University. His work is centered on the urban and regional tourism planning, and destination management
and marketing.
124 Y. FANG ET AL.

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