1. Introduction
At present, society perceives companies only from a financial perspective. Changes brought about by the environment, increased globalisation of markets, greater social repercussions, increased contribution of companies to community development through wealth creation, as well as other factors, such as the necessity to incorporate good governance practices or carry out socially responsible investments, have motivated organisations to adopt changes in their management employing the implementation of socially responsible practices [
1]. Despite this, the scientific community has not yet reached a unanimous definition of the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR), a situation that is justified, on the one hand, because the approaches vary greatly [
2], and on the other, because of the ethical and moral variables involved in establishing what activities should be defined as “sufficient” to consider a company socially responsible. There are therefore multiple definitions of CSR (see Činčalová and Prokop [
3]). In fact, Činčalová and Prokop [
3] analyzed 100 definitions of the term “Corporate Social Responsibility”, reaching the conclusion that the most frequent words used by authors and even key institutions to define it are: voluntary (83%), stakeholders (82%), social (71%), integration (65%), and economic (63%).
One of the most important economic sectors with significant rates of growth in the last years is tourism. Even though this year, because of the global coronavirus pandemic, the situation in the tourism sector is not at its best, tourism has always been a growth industry. Specifically, according to the Synthetic Index of the Spanish Tourist GDP (ISTE) (Available at:
http://www.exceltur.org/indice-sintetico-del-pib-turistico-espanol-iste/ (consulted 10 September 2020)), the tourist gross domestic product in Spain grew to a rate of 1.5% during the year 2019. These data show that the behaviour of the companies that form this sector significantly influences the development of a better, more equitable, and more sustainable society, thus contributing to its overall well-being [
4]. In its magnitude, tourism is a sector capable of generating social change, since it can alleviate problems such as unemployment and unequal opportunity and impel the creation of social value [
5]. In this context, according to Medrado and Jackson [
6], generally, hospitality companies tend to invest more in environmental initiatives concerning other economic sectors and worry less about environmental issues, such as the carbon footprint.
Based on the above, it is not surprising that there are more and more papers in the literature within the field of tourism that study the influence, involvement, development, or incidence of social responsibility in this sector [
7]. However, to follow trends and to create an agenda for new practices or research topics, scholars, professionals, managers, and editors should understand the progress or level of interest in the discipline [
8]. In this sense, we echo the mirror theory proposed by Ramos-Rodríguez and Ruiz Navarro [
9], which determines that once a scientific discipline has reached a certain degree of maturity, it is essential that its scholars turn their attention to the literature generated by its scientific community. It, therefore, seems necessary to make a quantitative analysis of published material [
10]. This is why bibliometric analysis is being increasingly used to map the structure and development of scientific fields or disciplines to assess the evolution of specific disciplines [
11].
Although there are numerous and very recent bibliometric analyses within the tourism sector [
12,
13,
14,
15,
16], indeed, very few studies have used bibliometric analysis to examine leading trends in terms of impact, leading journals, papers, topics, authors, institutions, and countries within the scope of social responsibility in the tourism sector (some exceptions are: Zanfardini et al. [
17], Garrigos-Simon et al. [
18], and Niñerola et al. [
19]). Despite the existence of these publications, the work of Zanfardini et al. [
17] made the only epistemological analysis of the evolution of CSR research in the tourism context during 20 years (1992–2012). It focused its study on the prominent journals in the field without taking into account a complete database. On the other hand, the works of Garrigos-Simon et al. [
18] and Niñerola et al. [
19] focused mainly on the relationship between sustainability and tourism. In this context, we cannot forget that although sustainability and social responsibility are closely related concepts, they do not cover the same aspects [
20].
In this sense, in an ample attempt to expand on the literature and show a more realistic state of affairs, based on the importance for the tourism sector of developing socially responsible practices [
21] and, therefore, on the need to analyse patterns and trends in research in this field [
17], this paper aims to study the social structure, as well as different metrics related to journals, authors, and documents within this field. The analysis and graphical presentations are relevant, as they can help researchers and practitioners better understand the state of the art of social responsibility in the tourism field.
The objective of the present work is to conduct a thorough review of the scientific production of articles on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and tourism using a bibliometric analysis, a methodology that has proliferated in the last decades (in this regard, interest in bibliometric research has increased as a result of the improvement in electronic repositories of academic publications and access through a greater number of databases [
22]) [
23,
24]. Essentially, we tried to provide answers to the following questions:
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How has the literature evolved?
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In which journals are these articles published?
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What countries show a more significant concern for this type of research?
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Who are the most productive authors?
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Which are the most influential documents?
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How are the international relations of scientific production in this field?
This research proceeds as follows. First, we describe the origin of the data, the methodology, and the analytic procedure. Second, we show the results. Third, we present our conclusions and discuss their implications and limitations. As well, we identify the main directions in which future research may advance.
2. Materials and Methods
Based on the contributions of Pritchard [
25], bibliometrics is the science that studies the nature and course of discipline using the calculation and analysis of the different facets of written communication. In contrast, the bibliometric methodology handles the quantitative analysis of individual variables present in a published text, approaching the situation scientifically at any given time: problems that dominate, most relevant authors, and underlying social and intellectual structure in that field. In this regard, Flores et al. [
26] considered it as “a tool that allows you to develop a set of indicators referred specifically to the scientific production of a discipline, providing, in this way, a base of discussion to consider the degree of consolidation and development of the same”. Bibliometric analysis is a quantitative study of literature and can provide evolutionary models of science, technology, and scholarship [
27].
The exact and correct application of the bibliometric methodology to the set of works that conform to the research conducted on a particular subject of study requires the examination of the main variables relating to the bibliometric research. Following the proposals exhibited in the literature ([
24,
26,
28] among others), the selection of the leading indices to analyse in the bibliometric study of any area of knowledge can revolve around the following items [
29,
30]:
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Titles of the journals in which the articles have been published,
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Most productive authors,
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Relevant content of the works,
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Index of collaboration in publications,
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Years of publication of the works,
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Percentage of contribution by countries.
The research data used in this paper were downloaded from the WoS Core Collection database, which comprises several sub-databases. We concentrated on data provided by the WoS, which only includes the most influential journals with the highest standards [
31], following previous studies [
18]. Also, it focuses on the academic and scientific production of the areas associated with the applied social sciences, besides incorporating bibliometric and citation analysis tools, aligned with the use of bibliometric procedures [
32].
The bibliometric data were analysed mainly using the software Biblioshiny for Biblometrix [
33], considered in recent years to be one of the most useful and complete tools for this type of analysis [
34]. To select the research to be evaluated, we retrieved all the papers that used the keywords “social responsibility”, “corporate social responsibility”, “CSR”, “hospitality”, “tourism”, and “tourist” simultaneously. They were searched in topics, which permitted locating the terms in the titles, keywords, and abstracts in the articles. The population included all papers up to 31 July 2020, and a total of 846 articles were obtained.
4. Discussion and Conclusions
Whereas the term CSR can seem relatively new in the business world, academic literature reveals that the evolution of the concept in itself has taken place over several decades. Although the majority of the empirical research on CSR focuses on large companies, our study shows an upward trend in the publication of articles centring on the tourism sector in prestigious journals within the field of business management and business ethics [
61]. This research studied the relevance of the academic literature that related CSR to tourism. In
Table 9, we present the answers to the main research questions made in the introduction.
As a result of the absence of studies in the literature and the importance of bibliometric approaches, we developed a bibliometric study on all the articles found during a 26-year period (1994–2020). This period covered all the published research on social responsibility in the tourism sector, and it helped to have a large number of documents that allowed having a complete view of this field of research. This is an essential contribution of our paper since other publications have studied other variables or shorter periods of time.
According to the analysis of this study in the ISI WoS database, several findings are reported. Firstly, the literature relating to tourism and CSR is still growing. Moreover, there has been a considerable increase from 2007 onwards, especially in the last two years. These results are in line with those presented by Garrigos-Simon et al. [
18] in their study on sustainability and CSR, showing that moral, ethical, and environmental issues are becoming an integral component of tourism policy and strategy.
Second, currently, CSR has been consolidated within the organisation, impacting on different areas, but especially on the business strategy of tourism companies [
19]. The attention that CSR is receiving in the tourism sector does not correspond to well-distributed scientific production throughout the world, although many countries already publish in this field. The leading research country that has written the most tourism and CSR papers is located in Spain, followed by the USA and China. Similar results were found in Herrera-Madueño et al. [
62]. Even though the study was on CSR and SMEs, both findings seem to show the interest and development of research and implementation of these practices in this country. However, Spain is not the country that collaborates most internationally with other authors. In this regard, the UK is the first country, with co-authorships with foreign colleagues. Thirdly, scientific production related to tourism and CSR has been widely applied in trend topics such as frameworks, loyalty, and consumers.
On the other hand, the quantitative analysis of the 846 documents served to draw several interesting conclusions. First, it was proved that the frequency indexes of author productivity distribution followed Lotka’s law. As occurred in Serrano et al. [
16], there was an unequal distribution of productivity among authors. Most of the authors relating tourism and CSR published a single document, accounting for 87.6% of the total number of authors. Therefore, the group with the highest productivity and influence consisted of a small number of researchers. In contrast, there were many authors with low production. In this sense, a few academics have written a significant number of papers. Font was the author who has published the most, with 18 articles to his credit. Of course, Lotka’s law only allows a quantitative analysis, which does not ensure the quality of the literature analysed.
Second, according to Bradford’s law, the three-zone ratio was approximately equal to 1:3:3
2, which meant the data were consistent with Bradford’s law [
38]. In this way, 354 sources were identified in the field studied. In the first area, the first third of articles were published in only 16 journals. Among these journals, the largest number of papers was written for the
Journal of Sustainable Tourism, followed by
Sustainability. Both were the most published journals in the field of tourism and CSR. To publish the second third, 75 journals were needed. The last 278 papers were published in 262 journals, almost one in each journal. The above data proved Bradford’s law. These findings were in line with Durán et al.’s [
63] bibliometric analysis of publications on wine tourism in the databases Scopus and WoS. It was also interesting to note that in the first 13 years of our study, no CSR and tourism journals were published in any of the top five journals. It was
Tourist Management, the third in the ranking, that published the first article in 2007. This large number of sources from further research indicated that the topic was multidisciplinary. It also represented an opportunity for researchers to find an outlet for their work. On the other hand, examinations of citations indicated that the most influential and most cited document in our field of research was one written by Inoue and Lee [
45]. It received an average of 24.70 citations per year, which, since 2011, has totalled 247 citations received.
Collaboration analysis indicated that the authors who worked together the most in articles were Xavier Font from the University of Surrey and Lluís Garay from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. In this way, they created a stable relationship between the two universities and a working relationship between England and Spain. Another interesting active link was between Lujun Su, Xiaohong Chen, and Scott R. Swanson. The first two authors are affiliated with the Central South University Business School and the third works at the University of Wisconsin. This showed the interaction between China and the USA. Finally, the co-authorship analysis revealed the prevalence of two countries (USA and UK) leading the main clusters. The study showed that the top two institutions that had international collaboration networks were the University of Surrey and the University of Johannesburg. It also revealed that Spanish universities did not have many contacts with international colleges despite being the country that published the most.
Our study contributes to both theory and practice. This research on the distribution of production in tourism and CSR contributes to informing researchers and academics of current issues and the development of the field under investigation; to allowing researchers to go deeper into the area as our analysis allowed to identify the most relevant authors, the best journals, or the most famous documents; as well as to identifying trend topics. This makes it possible for academics to identify trends in research in this area. On the other hand, this work will also be beneficial for those researchers and organisations related to documentation services or social science library services. Our investigation permits to know what topics and areas of research within this field should be promoted or what kind of journals should be purchased, which are useful in future lines of research.
However, the present study shows some limitations that must be mentioned. First of all, the group of indicators and bibliometric techniques used for the content analysis of published articles was an issue. It would be interesting to use other data analysis techniques with different objectives that complement this work, as, for example, the method of coappointments [
64]. In the same way, one could expand data searches to new search engines, as well as use other terms to search for the resulting articles. Another limitation may be linked to the fact that the study used abstracts and titles instead of full text for the selection of works. However, as already pointed out by Vázquez-Carrasco and López-Pérez [
43], although it is necessary to mention certain limitations of the research, it must also be taken into account that the defects of these studies are inherent to bibliometric analysis as a genre.
As a future line of research, and since Vázquez-Carrasco and López-Pérez [
43] already did this in their studies, we propose a bibliometric analysis to update the main CSR activities that tourism companies are actually carrying out for their stakeholders. We also suggest an analysis of the main barriers and drivers tourism companies have experienced while implementing CSR. On the other hand, future research could be to extend the analysis with the use of databases such as Scopus or Google Scholar, or other sources that analyse different types of documents or texts in other languages. It would also be interesting in the future to use other software or methodologies that could enrich this work, using other bibliographic methods. Finally, the study can be completed and redefined with a more in-depth analysis of some of the clusters and themes detected in this work. Last, but not least, and taking into account that the pandemic caused by COVID-19 has undoubtedly modified the sector at least temporarily, it will be interesting to carry out a study based on bibliometric tools to highlight and analyse the main themes and implications that management of the crisis has had on the sector at a national and even an international level.