Bibliometric study of creative tourism, tendencies and future lines of research

Objetive. The objective of this article is to analyze the scientific production on creative tourism indexed in the Scopus database and to identify gaps, trends and future lines of research. Method. The bibliometric method was used to map the state of the art and identify trends, gaps and future lines of research. A search was made in the Scopus database for scientific articles that included the terms creative tourism in the title, abstract or keywords. Bibexcel software was used to calculate productivity indicators and h-index. The VOSviewer software allowed the analysis of bibilometric networks of citation, co-citation and co-occurrence of keywords. Results. A total of 120 articles corresponding to the period 2002-2020 were found. The scientific production on creative tourism is growing and presents a high rate of topicality. Greg Richards was the most prolix author with the highest h-index, which confirms him as a reference in the subject. The most productive journals are Current Issues in Tourism and Annals of Tourism Research. Creative tourism has been studied from three fundamental thematic lines: tourism and creativity, creative experience and creative space. Conclusions. The implications of the results of the study for academics, researchers and tourism managers were presented. Studies on the profile of the creative tourist, the role of new technologies, co-creation of experiences, as well as the inclusion of variables such as repetition intention, image, motivation and the role of the community in creative tourism were proposed as research opportunities.