SHEDDING THE LIGHT ON DARK TOURISM RESEARCH: A SCIENTOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF LANDMARK STUDIES

The relationship between visitors and sites in dark tourism is quite complex and sensitive area of scientific research. Given that visitor's experience in dark tourism is strongly associated with a site and available interpretative components, both supply- and demand-side of the market should be simultaneously observed and analyzed in order to get useful and reliable data. The scientometric analysis performed in this paper has revealed that despite the growing academic interest and relevant body of literature, the research on demand-side of the market significantly prevails in the academic discourse on dark tourism. The analysis included 469 articles published in scientific journals between 1988 and 2020, of which 22 of them have been processed and classified as land mark studies in the field of dark tourism. The analysis showed that the overall number of publications on dark tourism has increased rapidly between 2015 and 2020 and has become an increasingly interdisciplinary research area, with strong background in social sciences. Despite the fact that dark tourism has been researched all over the world, the most frequently appearing authors are from the UK, USA, Australia, China, Canada, and the Netherlands, while landmark studies predominantly originate from the USA. The content analysis of the most cited studies identified four most frequent topics, namely typology of dark tourism sites, motivation for dark tourism travel, possibilities for further dark tourism development, and dark tourism experience. The results also show that the most cited articles on dark tourism were published between 2006 and 2015, leaving some early works as deficient in conceptual background and providing limited scientific synthesis. In the conclusion of the research, it was determined that the two-sided simultaneous approach, considering demand- and supply-side of the market at the same time, is the predominant and most effective way of doing research on dark tourism. Still, analyzed body of literature on dark tourism reveal several potential areas for further analyses of the supply-side of the market, namely dark tourism sites' peculiarities, identity, sense of place, authenticity of artefacts and interpretation, historical significance, and the international context of the product.