Artículos

Tourism based on intangible cultural heritage (ICH) has been gaining prominence within current tourism practices, and also in tourism studies. In this sense, this bibliometric study aims to characterize the production and publications in Ibero-American tourism journals in order to determine the advances and gaps in research on ICH. Fifty-nine articles from 12 tourism journals were analyzed. The findings reveal that, although cultural heritage tourism is a global trend, the publications analyzed here do not reflect this. Regional publications honour their geographical scope both in the origin of their authors and in the topics covered, which gives this work a purely regional perspective. There is no marked tendency for publications or authors to engage in systematic research and publication on ICH in its relationship with tourism. Brazil and Spain stand out as the most prolific countries in terms of the number of authors and affiliate institutions, and issues related to the tourist use of heritage, heritage education and the impacts of tourism are also prominent. These results allow researchers in tourism or ICH to locate specialized articles on Ibero-America and editors of regional tourism journals to recognize the lack of articles on ICH, as well as the need to publish in English to gain visibility. Future research should incorporate post-COVID-19 recovery within a sustainable approach to tourism use of the ICH.

Island ecosystems have very specific physical, economic and socio-cultural characteristics, which are shared by most of these ecosystems regardless of their geographical area. These characteristics include well defined geographical boundaries that lead to a greater degree of isolation, lack of economically exploitable resources, great external dependence for consumption, cultural and natural heritage with a high uniqueness level and a high concentration of endemic plant and animal species. All of them are responsible for the high development dependence level linked to the tourism activity of these ecosystems. Thus, island ecosystems are currently an important international tourism destination, where a great diversity of very attractive natural and cultural resources and of great heritage value are concentrated. This fact allows for the development of tourism activities of great heterogeneity among countries or regions of the world that host these island ecosystems. The aim of this research was to identify and analyze, through a bibliometric and bibliographic analysis, the scientific production indexed in the international Scopus database, which addresses the subject of use of cultural and natural resources by tourism in island ecosystems. This scientific mapping allows us to observe the evolution of scientific production in this field of study. The results show that this is a new subject (a large number of transient authors), predominantly affiliated with the United States and Spain. The most followed research lines to date are destination management followed very far by responsible environmental behavior and the impacts of sustainable development. However, the keywords with the highest co-occurrence show that the hot topics are tourism exploitation in the ecotourism field and sustainable tourism development. This research is considered the first bibliometric study carried out which is related to this thematic approach, providing a clear in-depth analysis for researchers and thereby facilitating the approach of future research work.