Big data and tourism research: measuring research impact

Abstract

Digital transformation and technological advances are causing a radical change in com‑ munication structures and in the way information is consumed. With rapid development of computing and the Internet, data is generated, recorded, stored and accumulated on a large scale, making it necessary for economic sectors to act quickly in order to adapt their busi‑ nesses to the online environment and thus, ensure their own survival. The application of Big Data in tourism enables to transform all this data into useful information, so that com‑ panies in the sector can defne and optimize their strategies in order to increase their prof‑ its. This article performs a comparative bibliometric analysis of the presence and impact of scientifc production related to Big Data within the area of tourism research indexed in the WoS and Scopus databases. The aim is to know key aspects such as its growth, correlation, citation, coverage, overlap, dispersion or concentration that will support future research‑ ers when they start their work in this emerging feld. From the analysis of the 113 articles selected between the two bases through an advanced search for terms with a time limit set in 2019, it can be concluded that this is a new feld of knowledge, which has aroused great interest since 2017, publishing about two thirds of the articles during the period 2017– 2019. Although WoS and Scopus difer in general terms in scope and coverage policies, both systems are complementary and not exclusive. In the specifc area of Big Data and Tourism Research, Scopus is the base that provides better coverage by collecting a higher number of articles and receiving more citations.