Published in Scientific Papers. Series "Management, Economic Engineering in Agriculture and rural development", Vol. 25 ISSUE 1
Written by Andrei Ștefan VASILE, Liviu MARCUTA, Alina MARCUTA, Valentina Constanța TUDOR, Cornelia Marilena DAMIAN (BADEA)

In the contemporary context of economic development and environmental conservation, sustainable tourism is an important field of research that significantly impacts local communities and natural resource management. The need to reconcile the growth of the tourism industry with the preservation of ecosystems and cultural heritage while producing long-term financial rewards makes this topic vital. Given the difficulties posed by climate change, the rise of mass tourism, and its effects on the environment and society, there is a growing interest in discovering efficient tourist management solutions. This desire led to the selection of this issue. Using a bibliometric method, the study sought to identify the most influential works, authors, journals, and international collaborations by analyzing the structure and development of the scientific literature on sustainable tourism. The bibliometric methodology was used in the study, and the associations between publications, authors, and nations were shown using the VOSviewer software and the Scopus database. Concept maps and collaborative networks were generated to demonstrate major trends in the field, and analysis focused on co-citation relationships, keyword co-occurrence, and bibliographic coupling. The results obtained indicated that sustainable tourism is an expanding field, with an exponential increase in publications over the last two decades. The most influential works are centered on destination management, environmental impact of tourism, sustainability strategies and tourist behaviour. In terms of the geographical distribution of research, a dominance of developed countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Australia and Spain has been observed, while emerging countries, although present, have a smaller impact. The analysis also highlighted a strong interconnection between sustainable tourism and other fields such as economics, ecology and development policies. However, the study highlighted several gaps in current research, including the lack of in-depth studies on the integration of new technologies in sustainable tourism, the long-term economic impact of tourism on local communities, regional disparities in the adoption of sustainability strategies, the influence of tourists' behavior on the implementation of responsible tourism and the need for standardized methods to evaluate the effectiveness of applied strategies. We believe that future research perspectives should focus on promoting interdisciplinary approaches and international collaborations for the development of sustainable models applicable on a global scale.

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