Big data and tourism research: measuring research impact

Digital transformation and technological advances are causing a radical change in communication structures and in the way information is consumed. With rapid development of computing and the Internet, data is generated, recorded, stored and accumulated on a large scale, making it necessary for economic sectors to act quickly in order to adapt their businesses to the online environment and thus, ensure their own survival. The application of Big Data in tourism enables to transform all this data into useful information, so that companies in the sector can define and optimize their strategies in order to increase their profits. This article performs a comparative bibliometric analysis of the presence and impact of scientific production related to Big Data within the area of tourism research indexed in the WoS and Scopus databases. The aim is to know key aspects such as its growth, correlation, citation, coverage, overlap, dispersion or concentration that will support future researchers when they start their work in this emerging field. From the analysis of the 113 articles selected between the two bases through an advanced search for terms with a time limit set in 2019, it can be concluded that this is a new field of knowledge, which has aroused great interest since 2017, publishing about two thirds of the articles during the period 2017–2019. Although WoS and Scopus differ in general terms in scope and coverage policies, both systems are complementary and not exclusive. In the specific area of Big Data and Tourism Research, Scopus is the base that provides better coverage by collecting a higher number of articles and receiving more citations.