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Review
. 2021 Oct 16;18(20):10875.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph182010875.

Medical, Health and Wellness Tourism Research-A Review of the Literature (1970-2020) and Research Agenda

Lina Zhong  1 , Baolin Deng  1 , Alastair M Morrison  2 , J Andres Coca-Stefaniak  2 , Liyu Yang  1
Affiliations
Review

Medical, Health and Wellness Tourism Research-A Review of the Literature (1970-2020) and Research Agenda

Lina Zhong et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Medical, health and wellness tourism and travel represent a dynamic and rapidly growing multi-disciplinary economic activity and field of knowledge. This research responds to earlier calls to integrate research on travel medicine and tourism. It critically reviews the literature published on these topics over a 50-year period (1970 to 2020) using CiteSpace software. Some 802 articles were gathered and analyzed from major databases including the Web of Science and Scopus. Markets (demand and behavior), destinations (development and promotion), and development environments (policies and impacts) emerged as the main three research themes in medical-health-wellness tourism. Medical-health-wellness tourism will integrate with other care sectors and become more embedded in policy-making related to sustainable development, especially with regards to quality of life initiatives. A future research agenda for medical-health-tourism is discussed.

Keywords: bibliometric analysis; medical-health-wellness tourism; research agenda; thematic analysis.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Number of articles by publication year.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Author article productivity.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Country of origin of authors in medical-health-wellness tourism.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Institutions of authors.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Frequencies of research keywords.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Timeline of research keyword appearance.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Themes of research articles.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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