Forty years of the rural tourism research: reviewing the trend, pattern and future agenda

Rural tourism has been a key research area over the last few decades. However, evaluating the advancement of its dimensions as a systematic and comprehensive audit was long overdue. This study performed a bibliometric analysis on 404 articles from 1980 to 2019 and revealed that rural tourism has maximum growth in the last two decades. Deductive and quantitative methods are the principally implemented theoretical and methodical approaches, respectively. The developed countries have majorly contributed from 1980 to 1999, while the last two decades the developing nations have contributed. The rural tourism research in the developed world has matured by debating critical issues such as community politics, power struggle, resource control, whereas these issues along with several new issues, such as climate change and epidemic, have ample scope in future especially in the context of Eastern World. This study offers an insight into the evolution of conceptual framework, authorship, institution-specific productivity, spatial distribution of study areas, crucial themes, and the future research directions. The present findings will work as a comprehensive reference to the potential research dimensions and add to the existing knowledge body of the tourism research in general and the rural tourism research in particular.