Educational Study Tour Research Hotspots and Development Orientation: An LDA-based Literature Review
Abstract
Educational tourism has received growing academic attention in recent years as globalization and international educational exchanges continue to expand. This study explores the major research hotspots and future development trends in educational study tourism research. Using the Web of Science (WOS) database, 12,218 publications related to “study tourism” published between 2015 and 2024 were initially collected. After screening and classification, 842 relevant publications were retained, and the 100 most relevant articles were further analysed using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling method. The findings show that current research mainly focuses on educational tourism, tourist experience, students, international educational tourism, rural tourism, influencing factors, and economic development. Several emerging directions were also identified, including tourism quality, awareness, behavioural intention, satisfaction, school-based programs, cultural heritage, and industry-related tourism. Overall, educational tourism research is becoming more interdisciplinary and internationally oriented. This study helps clarify the development of educational tourism research and provides references for future studies in international educational tourism.
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