Senior tourism – a scientometric review (1998-2017)
Purpose This study aims to identify intellectual structures, emerging trends and future research opportunities via a bibliometric analysis of senior tourism research from 1998 until 2017. Design/methodology/approach A detailed search of 700 core articles and 7,221 citations collated from Web-of-Science and Scopus was implemented and analyzed through CiteSpace. Findings The results reveal a slow increase in the amount of research, with six main areas of research. The most cited articles are mainly older. The USA has a solid leadership in publications, followed by Australia and China. The network of journals and institutions show a core peripheral structure where Tourism Management and University of Queensland are ranked first. The identification of structural holes, critical articles and the development of new emerging tendencies highlights the priorities in the senior tourism domain, pointing to new opportunities for research. Originality/value The originality of this paper consists in a temporal and dynamic analysis of the past two decades, using CiteSpace for a co-citation and co-occurrence network analysis.