3.1. Performance Analysis and Keywords: 2002–2019
Consistent with the research theme being relatively new, as discussed in the introductory section, the first publications collected in the WoS were published in 2002. Since then, the literature has experienced rapid growth, going from a single article published in 2002 to 40 articles in 2019, amounting to 214 over the entire period. The distribution of the 214 publications used in this study is shown in
Figure 1.
These articles were published in 121 different magazines. Only 40.2% published just one article, and 15.9% published two articles. This shows that scientific production in the field of sports tourism and sustainability is often published in nonspecialized publications. An explanation could be the transversal nature of both tourism and sustainability. These topics can be covered in many different fields of knowledge [
45]. Therefore, such papers are published in magazines as diverse as
Revista Romaneasca Pentru Educatie Multidimensionala, the
Journal of Business Ethics, or
Urban Geography.
The journals that published the most papers on the subject of this study, by volume of published articles, are listed in
Table 1. This table shows that 30.8% of the papers published are concentrated in eight magazines.
According to
Table 1, the journal
Sustainability stands out with 19 articles published on the subject (9%), well ahead of the
Journal of Sport Management in the second position with eight papers. This significant difference is not due to the publication of any special issue on sustainability.
Sustainability is an interdisciplinary journal that deals with sustainability from different perspectives: economic, social, cultural, and environmental.
Sustainability is not a journal that specializes in tourism or sports tourism. Therefore, the number of sports tourism-related articles published in
Sustainability is striking. However, the
Journal of Sport Management, with only eight articles, has by far the most citations, with 243, averaging more than 30 citations per article published. Unlike
Sustainability, the
Journal of Sport Management does not have a focus on sustainable development, but on sports and sports organizations in general—the other aspect of the analyzed field. Almost 4% of the scientific production analyzed has been published in the
Journal of Sport Management. The 14 citations per article of the
European Sport Management Quarterly, in third place for number of articles, are also very high.
The field of sports tourism and sustainability is characterized by the participation of a large number of authors. The names of 482 different authors were obtained from the WoS; each article has an average of 2.24 authors. However, only five authors published more than three articles (
Table 2), and more than 95% of the authors produced just one paper, indicating a low concentration in this field of study.
The most productive organizations in this area are located in the United States (State University System of Florida) and Australia (Griffith University and the University of Technology Sydney).
The most important works in this field, according to the number of citations received [
46,
47] are presented in
Table 3. Unequal distribution is observed, with most of the works being concentrated at the lower end of the interval, without citations or with a small number of citations. The number of papers with fewer than five citations is 28.5%. More than 30% have no citations and little or no visibility. This may be because the research was not of sufficient academic interest to be cited, or because the articles were published very recently [
20]. This second option could justify the small number of citations of articles published in 2018 and 2019 (the final two years of our analysis period), which represent 48% of all articles with fewer than five citations.
In contrast, only 10 papers (less than 5% of all publications) were cited more than 50 times.
More details about the 10 most cited papers are presented in
Table 4 (ordered by number of citations). The table shows that two of the magazines listed in
Table 1 appear to have the highest productivity in the field: the
International Journal of the History of Sport and the
Journal of Sport Management.
Table 2 includes the names of the two most productive authors in the field: Schulenkorf and O’Brien (who produces two articles).
Finally, the most frequently used keywords in the different papers are identified. These keywords indicate the most studied topics. For this purpose, both the authors’ keywords and KeyWordsPlus were taken into account. Out of the 1,042 keywords identified, only 18 appeared more than 10 times. ‘Sustainability’ and ‘tourism’ were the keywords that recurred the most, which means that they are at the center of the network. The other frequently used keywords are as follows: impact, sports events, Olympic Games, sports tourism, sport, legacy, and mega-event. All of them had occurrences of between 21 and 34 and a link strength of between 68 and 122. The full link strength indicates the number of links of an item to other items and the overall strength of the links of an object with another item [
39].
Figure 2 shows the co-occurrence of the 38 keywords with a minimum number of five occurrences. The most recurring keywords are represented in larger nodes. The shorter the distance between the different nodes, the stronger the relationship between the keywords. The program identified four clusters or groups of words related to each other (nodes of the same color belong to the same cluster). Sustainability, sports events, and mega-events belong to the same cluster (green); impacts, Olympic Games, and legacy belong to the blue cluster; sport tourism and sport to the red one; and tourism to the yellow one.
3.2. Performance and Conceptual Analysis: Three Stages in the Period 2002–2019
However, although the research topic is relatively new, significant changes in productivity are observed for the period 2002–2019, which allow us to identify three stages of research [
41] (see
Figure 1).
In the first period (2002–2009), which we call the “initial stage”, there were 25 published articles (just over three articles per year). It is noted that in 2004, according to the search criteria used, there were no publications. A second “development stage” (2010–2015) followed, during which more than 13 articles a year were published, with 80 publications during that period. The year 2012 saw above-average productivity, with the publication of 20 articles. This high production can, to an extent, be explained by two major worldwide sporting events in 2010: the Winter Olympics in Vancouver and the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. In the third stage, the “expansive stage” (2016–2019), 109 articles were published. This last four-year stage contributed almost 51% of the total literature production in the field to date. This production boom in the field can be directly connected with the increased visibility of the theme of sustainable development worldwide, resulting from the 2015 United Nations SDGs, which could explain the increase in scientific research in the field since 2016.
Of the 121 journals that make up our study,
Table 5 presents the ones that dealt most frequently with the subject of study, by volume of articles published and distributed according to the three stages or periods into which the study is divided.
Table 5 shows a different evolution pattern between journals. Some journals show growth in the number of articles published per year on the subject. This is the case for
Sustainability,
International Journal of Event and Festival Management,
Sport in Society, and
Leisure Studies. Other journals have experienced a different evolution, with greater productivity in the development stage than in the expansive stage. This is the case for the
Journal of Sport Management, the
European Sport Management Quarterly, and the
International Journal of the History of Sport. Regarding the number of citations, the development stage is the only stage where all the journals in
Table 5 received a citation. The average number of citations is lower in the expansion stage, which may be explained by the current status of the articles. Finally, although in the initial stage articles were published in just two of the most productive journals, these journals have the highest average number of citations per article.
However, in general, the results show that research on sports tourism and sustainability has grown throughout the three stages of development in the field. In the initial phase, 29 articles were published in 24 different journals; in the development stage, 84 studies were published in 55 journals; finally, in the expansion stage, 113 papers were published in 73 journals.
More complete and detailed information is collected in
Table 6, which shows the most productive authors for each period and the average number of citations for each article. The number of authors with productivity equal to or greater than two articles increases as we move from the initial stage to the development stage, and from there to the expansive stage. By the average number of citations, it could be said that the authors in the initial stage can be considered as primary referents. However, there are also other relevant authors by their academic production on this topic in more than one period. This is true of D. O’Brien (initial stage and development stage) and K. Kaplanidou and L. Misener (development stage and expansive stage).
Having analyzed the keyword network in
Figure 2, we performed a longitudinal analysis to find out the bibliometric map of the evolution of the research topics during the three defined stages of the period analyzed (
Figure 3). To carry out this analysis, in all cases, items were tagged using the most significant keyword, apart from the group called nostalgia-sport-tourism. In this case, all keywords responding to the concept of nostalgia-sport-tourism have been collected in a single cluster with that name.
An inclusion index was used to detect the links between the different themes (represented by circles) and define the thematic areas (lines). The size of the sphere corresponds to the number of documents on each subject [
48].
As shown in
Figure 3, in the first period, 2002–2009, five research topics were identified. It was a beginning stage in the field, during which the academic literature focused primarily on case analysis of the impact of small-scale sporting events, their relationship with tourism, and the role played by different public policies. However, during the second period, 2010–2015, there was a greater diversity of issues related to the earlier concerns, such as education, regional development, environment, behavior, and legacy. Two themes from the first period were maintained: tourism and impacts. It is possible to differentiate between subjects with reliable connections to issues in the first period (continuous lines), such as education, legacy, community and residents, tourism, impacts, and environment. However, behavior, methodological models, and regional development had weaker connections (dotted lines) with keywords from the previous period, though none of these were the main themes in the second stage. The importance of destination and urban planning is a new issue that arises during this second period. Finally, in the third period, 2016–2019, there was another increase in research topics, with four of the themes of the previous period being maintained (education, behavior, methodological models, and destination-urban-planning) and a reappearance of public policy from the first stage. Also, seven new themes arose in this period: nostalgia-sport-tourism, mega-sport-events, satisfaction, ecological footprint, management, sports organizations, and disability sports.
The different themes identified in
Figure 3 for each period are represented in a strategic diagram, in which the size of the sphere is proportional to the number of documents linked to each research topic (
Figure 4,
Figure 5 and
Figure 6). Centrality can be interpreted as the external cohesion of the network since it measures the degree of interaction of a system with other networks, while density can be understood as the internal cohesion of the network since it measures the inner strength of the network [
42].
Analysis of the different topics’ positions in the strategic diagrams for each period revealed that, in the first period (2002–2009), the field pivoted around five themes, among which the analysis of impacts (economic, social, and regional) stands out. This is a relevant topic, considered as a transversal and necessary theme in sports tourism and sustainability. The theme of public policy had more centrality in this period. Together with tourism, it constituted a “motor cluster” in the research area. The theme of public policy includes research on topics such as governance, the implementation of public policies, and general tourism policies. Meanwhile, the second theme, tourism, includes articles researching issues related to the development of tourism, such as tourist motivation, trust, and perceptions. In this period, there was little apparent development in the analysis of small-scale sporting events (
Figure 4).
In the following two periods, it is evident that the field was composed of motor clustering themes and basic and transversal themes (upper and lower right quadrants, respectively), which are considered as those that favor the development and consolidation of a field of knowledge due to its density and centrality.
In the second period (2010–2015), the tourism issue was consolidated as a motor clustering theme, also appearing as motor behavior (including work on tourist practices, consumer practices, changes in behavior, or intentionality) [
49,
50], and legacy. The position in the center of the diagram of a topic already relevant in the previous period can be highlighted, specifically the analysis of different impacts: this was a prevalent topic in this second period, being equidistant in centrality and density. Other new issues of great significance also appeared in this period, such as community and residents (where topics such as residents’ perceptions, commitment, and community participation are discussed), the feelings of residents, and regional development (
Figure 5).
In the third period (2016–2019), the field pivoted around 12 research topics, some of them having already been present in one of the two preceding periods, but that showed changes in their role or their weight within the subject of the analysis. For example, in these four years, education became a motor theme, while behavior, a motor theme in the previous period, had less development in the third period and could be considered as an important, but declining, issue. Overall, the field evolved toward more significant methodological development through models, measurements, and quantification of impacts, effects, and indicators that constitute thematic and methodological models (cluster analysis, Delphi technique, and partial least squares). Methodological models appeared in the previous period as a developed topic, although isolated from the rest, while in the third period, it was an important transversal theme in the development of the field. In this sense, the destination-urban-planning theme had also evolved as an emerging theme in the previous period. The focus was on infrastructure research, urban planning of the tourist destination, and the urbanization process. In this period, public policy, the motor theme of the first period, reappeared, but this time as a declining issue, with much less development (
Figure 6).
In addition to these changes, it is noteworthy that, in last period, mega-sport-events were emerging as the theme with the highest centrality and density. This theme refers to research on remarkable sporting and tourist events at international and world levels such as the Olympic Games, the FIFA World Cup, the Tour de France, and the Ironman. This theme is closely related to sustainability in its network of keywords (
Figure 7). It was also found as a motor management theme (event, visitor, and destination) and as an ecological footprint, which falls between a motor theme and an underlying theme.
Finally, it should be noted that, although the concept of sustainability does not seem thematic in any of the strategic diagrams built for the three stages, it did appear in the keywords related to relevant motor themes, such as the analysis of mega sporting events, and emerged under another denomination as ecological footprint [
51,
52] and transversely in other keywords, such as impact analysis or destination planning.