A bibliometric analysis of birdwatching tourism research: An exploration for emerging insights

In recent years, birdwatching has become one of the fastest-growing forms of nature-based tourism and is often referred to as avitourism. Birdwatching has a relatively long history, but many research questions and avenues of inquiry remain unexamined. We quantitatively reviewed the literature on birdwatching using VOSviewer version 1.6.16 and the Bibliometrix package for R to assess the growth of the field over time. The results show that a total of 1371 publications have been published on the topic between 1978 and 2022. The annual growth in the number of publications was 2.59% and publications written through international collaboration constituted 20.02% of the total research output. Researchers and commentators in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada were the largest contributors. Our results showed that birdwatching, birding, and citizen science are the motor themes, which means they significantly contribute to the development of the field. Moreover, ecosystem services, cultural ecosystem services, and recreation are emerging themes that require further development. Future studies are expected to focus on fostering avitourism in developing nations through training and collaboration between local and international NGOs. Improvement of local livelihoods and grass-roots organization should be the focus of future efforts given the potential of avitourism as a source of income and incentive for wildlife conservation action.