Illustrating the Scientific Co- Authorship Network in Geotourism Research

Geotourism is one of the new concepts that has attracted the attention of the academics. The growing of published articles in this field has made it necessary to have a holistic review of geotourism studies. The findings of this research are expected to help identifying research gaps in this field and pave the way for future research. The purpose of this study is to illustrate the situation in geotourism studies via describing and analyzing English articles published in geotourism field. Achieving the purpose, scientometrics and social network analysis methods are applied. After searching related words in title, abstract and keywords of articles, data were analyzed using Density and Clustering Coefficient and Centrality indexes in VOSviewer, UCINET, NETDRAW software. Based on results the US, UK, Australia, Italy and Germany have a key role in the research network of this field. In addition to introducing authors who have a relatively high degree of centrality, it was found that most of these articles focused on topics such as conservation, evolution, management, diversity, ecotourism. Both Co- authorship and Co-occurrence of the articles published by Iranian researchers in English were also evaluated in this study.