Mountain tourism research. A review

Abstract

In recent years, mountain tourism has gradually increased its position among tourists´ preferences at international level. The main reason is the strong relationship that man develops with nature and precisely with the mountain, becoming a destination of great tourist influx. An adequate use of these tourist flows results in the development of a sustainable activity, capable of contributing to the improvement of economic conditions in these areas. The objective of this research is to identify and analyse the indexed scientific production on "mountain tourism" in the international databases Scopus and Web of Science, in order to analyse in-depth the current state of this area of study. The work methodology focuses on a bibliometric analysis of the 134 items identified by searching the term "Mountain Tourism". Prior to this analysis, the level of coverage and overlap of the information in both databases was analysed. The results show that Scopus performs a greater coverage of scientific production. In addition, the research is in its exponential growth stage, most researchers are small producers, only 19 have between two and three publications and the European continent is the most prolific in research on mountain tourism. Finally, note that, despite its long coverage over time, more than 40 years, it is an emerging area of study and there are many research lines that must be studied further.