1. Introduction
The relationship between the process of exploiting resources, both natural and cultural (tangible or intangible) by tourism activity, and the development of territories, is configured as a constant dynamic between human beings and their environment [
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6]. In this regard, the resources of a territory “are part of a network of great value and wealth, which must be promoted and marketed in a sustainable way, with the aim of improving the socioeconomic development of local populations in destinations and the conservation of resources” [
7]. On the other hand, the World Tourism Organization [
8] states that tourism activity can favor local development or that of a geographical area if it is configured as “an integral part of balanced sustainable development, providing benefits to all tourism stakeholders of a destination”.
Therefore, through the use of knowledge related to the resources, both renewable and non-renewable of each territory, human beings carry out an economic transformation process of those resources through tourism activity. The first group includes natural and cultural resources, which although they may not always be of exceptional value as proposed by UNESCO, it is recognized that all territories have the capacity to attract the attention of other people, thus leading to tourist flows, as tourism can enhance spaces or objects that are not of interest for other activities [
9]. In this context, Myga–Piątek [
10] states that all natural and cultural elements, which each territory harbors, are established as basic resources for the development of tourism activity, since they provide scenic values and fulfill recreational, emotional, cognitive, and operational functions [
11]. It should be pointed out that for a person to engage in some type of tourism, there must be some motivation for the visit (resources), which serves as an attraction for the tourist and in this way, the recreational activities to be carried out in the destination can be taken full advantage of.
There are many and varied resources with the potential for tourism exploitation [
12]. They converge in building an environment that provides the elements and materials from which the shaping force of culture creates the cultural landscape [
13,
14]. Within the natural resources, all the natural heritage and natural processes that make it up are considered, thus integrating a wide diversity of ecosystems and life zones, while cultural resources focus on the knowledge of the culture of other spaces, which has become one of the first reasons to generate tourism trips in the world. Along with it, the cultural heritage of societies is built, encompassing a wide variety of elements ranging from tangible to intangible. All these resources have become the current basis for enhancing the image and brand of destinations [
15].
The use of resources should be focused on achieving local development, which enables the creation of economic alternatives (business activity), social security, fighting poverty, and a healthy lifestyle and sustainable development [
2,
5,
9,
16,
17,
18,
19,
20,
21,
22]. In addition, this has a parallel effect of protecting the natural and cultural heritage. In this context, the local population becomes the key actor for its management [
23] enabling good governance of tourist sites and the emergence or repositioning of economically depressed territories [
24].
Undeniably, tourism has been proposed as a sustainable economic alternative for spaces of diverse nature [
25]. UNESCO has also recognized the capacity of natural and cultural heritage as a resource for sustainable territorial development. In this regard, the UNWTO encourages linking all forms of tourism with sustainable development, with the aim of achieving sustainable tourism, which is a trend seen as one of world’s leading travel practices [
26,
27]. This is due to the fact that tourists are increasingly aware of the impact that their visit can cause both environmentally [
28] and culturally [
29].
Based on this context, alternative forms of tourism have emerged as a mechanism of use, which are established as an offer opposed to mass tourism, such as creative tourism, ecotourism, agro-tourism, community tourism, and rural tourism, among others [
23,
30,
31,
32,
33,
34,
35]. On the basis of these forms of exploitation, the aim is to achieve sustainable tourism as an umbrella for the management of areas in which there is not only one single perspective, but which is as inclusive as possible in order to achieve the conservation of natural resources and cultures, without causing their degradation, thus allowing the continuity of their tourist operation over time [
36].
In this context, tourism—the use of natural and cultural resources—regional development, the aim is to identify the existing scientific production that explores the relationship between tourism exploitation of natural and cultural resources and regional development. It was identified and analyzed using bibliometric analysis following the guidelines of the PRISMA method. The databases considered were Web of Science and Scopus. This literature review was conducted in accordance with Page et al. [
37] that “systematic reviews are useful in many critical ways, as they can provide a synthesis of the state of knowledge in a given area, from which future research priorities can be identified, questions addressed that otherwise cannot be answered by individual studies and problems in primary research that should be corrected in future studies be identified …” (p. 1). This synthesis of the state of knowledge in a specific area is of interest to researchers on the subject. On the other hand, there is no bibliometric study on the subject. In fact, there are studies that cover specific areas on the use of natural and cultural resources by tourism and their relationships with regional development, such as the study by Álvarez–García et al. [
38] on the relationship between the use of cultural heritage by tourism and regional development (WoS and Scopus database) and the study by del Río–Rama et al. [
39], considering island tourism (Scopus) or the study by Pimienta et al. [
40], in which they study the relationship in a creative tourism environment. Other bibliometric studies are Herrera–Franco et al. [
41,
42] in geotourism and geoparks, and Zeng et al. [
43] in mountain tourism.
This document is structured in 4 sections. The introduction contextualizes the study area, sets out the objective, and justifies the novelty.
Section 2 presents the search criteria for scientific documentation, the PRISMA statement and the search equations.
Section 3 collects the results obtained and the last section includes the conclusions derived from the analyses carried out together with the limitations of the research conducted.
2. Materials and Methods
To meet the stated objective, a bibliometric analysis using mathematics, applied statistics, and other research ideas was developed [
44]. The aim was to achieve a detailed review of a large amount of information, both in general and specific terms, by means of various tools [
45,
46,
47]. This contributes to the purpose of identifying and characterizing the processes of exploitation of natural and cultural resources linked to tourism.
The process of constructing the study was based on a systematic and thorough search for the documentary units that will articulate the database for the analysis of the thematic approach under study [
48,
49]. In this way, the reliability and validity of data collection will be closely related to the protocol applied, thereby increasing the precision of the analysis [
50,
51]. Among the criteria to be considered are the database to be used, quality of metadata, time coverage, and coverage of documentary units, among other elements that could improve the quality of the reviews by allowing the protocol to be transparent, consistent, and reproducible [
52,
53].
2.1. Search Criteria and Identification of Sources
The systematic search protocol is applied to the international and multidisciplinary databases Scopus from Elsevier and Web of Science (WoS) provided by Clarivate Analytics integrated into the ISI Web of Knowledge. These databases have four key characteristics that influenced the decision to use them in this research: (a) access and download to a wide variety of metadata, a condition that facilitates the identification and characterization of documentary units; (b) coverage of a wide variety of areas of science [
54]; (c) relative quality indices that are SJR—SCImago Journal Rank from Scopus and JCR—Journal Citation Reports from WoS, an element that supports the quality of the information provided by the databases [
55]; and (d) broad time coverage [
56].
Table 1 shows the criteria and search equations used in both databases.
2.2. Method or Statement PRISMA
The use of the PRISMA method in this research allowed a systematic review to be conducted following quality parameters “by describing why the review was conducted, what was done and what was found” [
37] (p. 2). The process consisted of three phases: identification of studies, screening, and inclusion of studies. In the first phase, to identify the documents, the search was carried out by using query terms and search operators. The construction of the advanced search equation is a decisive element for the entire process because the combination of elements should make it possible to describe the entire thematic approach, in order to achieve the broadest possible coverage and capture the largest possible number of documents [
57,
58,
59] (
Table 2). From the application of the search equation, 593 articles were identified in Scopus and 262 in WoS, consolidating 855 initial documents.
In the second phase (document screening), the exclusion criteria corresponding to the refinement of the metadata were applied: elimination of junk codes, blank spaces within the general database, elimination of duplicate documents, and all those that did not have identifiable bibliometrics were also discarded, as well as those that were not related to the thematic approach based on a bibliographic review of the title, abstract, and keywords [
57]. Finally, the articles participating in the analysis were defined with a total of 553 (
Figure 1).
2.3. Data Extraction
Once the work base was consolidated, the information from the general set of articles was downloaded from both the Scopus and WoS databases. The information was processed in *.ris format, thus facilitating the identification of all the variables to be analyzed by the indicators of the bibliometric study. For the evaluative analysis, Microsoft Office Excel software was applied, and for the relational analysis or scientific mapping, the bibliometric analysis software VOSviewer was used [
63,
64,
65,
66,
67]. Bibliographic reference management was carried out using the Mendeley program.
2.4. Data Analysis
Three types of analysis or approaches were followed for the data analysis. First, a study of the overlap of production between the databases was carried out, with the purpose of establishing the singularity of the information [
38,
49], as well as the overlap of data. Three mathematical calculations were used (
Table 3).
An evaluative analysis was then carried out by applying three types of indicators [
72,
73].
(1) Quantity indicators, i.e., they establish production and productivity measures which analyze the number of articles based on the variables authors/years/journals/countries/institutions/collaborations [
74];
(2) Performance indicators, which correspond to measures that capture the impact and record of use achieved by the production, based on variables such as total citations per author/journal/country/year [
75];
(3) Structural indicators, which determine the connections between the previous types, based on variables such as journals/authors/research areas [
72,
76,
77].
The selection of these indicators corresponds to the most accepted types of analysis within the bibliometric field, and they provide accurate and reliable results [
78,
79,
80,
81].
The third type of analysis, which complements the previous ones by performing a deeper analysis, is network mapping of scientific literature with VOSviewer. Through this mapping, social, and intellectual relationships and interactions are visualized [
49], using several variables such as citations, words, authors, and bibliographic coupling [
47,
82,
83]. Co-occurrence analysis is established as a very useful method for dimensioning research fields, since it graphically provides an overview of the links achieved to date [
39,
84].
4. Conclusions
The joint integrated database with 507 articles, which allowed us to fulfill the objective proposed in this research, shows that there is little research in relation to this subject, with scientific production developed over 39 years. It was identified that 60% of the studies in both databases obtained between 1 and 25 citations, in addition to the fact that 96% of the authors were transient, and only one author with moderate production was identified in Scopus with 6 studies. The average collaboration was 2.65 authors per document in the general context of the approach, with a predominance of collaboration between authors from the same country, but generally affiliated to different institutions. Production by country was concentrated in China, Russia, South Korea, Portugal, and the United States. This aspect is corroborated by the scientific mapping, which showed that there were no consolidated collaboration relationships, all of which were endogenous at the moment. Within the ACA analysis, three clusters of work were identified, which had a reduced number of authors, as well as a reduced number of citations. One thing that stood out was that the leading authors of each of the co-citation clusters addressed tourism issues, but did not present the production linked to the thematic approach under study. The resources in which these types of articles were published were linked to environmental sciences, social sciences, earth sciences, and biological sciences. The journal with the highest number of publications was Sustainability with 20 articles, while Annals of Tourism Research accumulated the highest number of citations with 261 in Scopus and Tourism Geographies in WoS with 246.
The scientific mapping obtained in this research showed that there is little literature on the relationship between the use of natural and cultural resources by tourism and the regional development of the territory, both from an economic and social point of view. Therefore, it is clear that there is a need for researchers to study this subject more in depth on an ongoing basis, and it was observed that researchers in this area, following Crane’s classification [
96] were transient with only a single publication. Therefore, there were no consolidated groups of researchers on the subject, nor were there any large producers.
The need for research in this area is reinforced if we consider that tourism, as mentioned by the World Tourism Organization, is an activity that is showing sustained growth worldwide and that there is a strong link between its growth and the use of its natural and cultural resources. Tourism is also one of the main alternatives for territorial economic development in many territories.
This subject must be approached from different social disciplines such as economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, geography, and political science, among others, in order to know and understand this phenomenon and produce new knowledge. Among other approaches, it is important to investigate the role of the different types of tourism developed based on the use of natural and cultural resources in regional development.
Like all research and taking into account the technique used, bibliometric analysis has several limitations. The first one refers to the use of a certain search equation in which terms are included that may not be explicitly included in the search fields of the document considered by the database search engine, as well as not including all possible terms. Another limitation is that the two main international databases (English language) are used; however, there are many others (SciELO-Scientific Electronic Library Online, ProQuest, EBSCO, etc.). Therefore, future research could expand the databases used. Finally, the approach followed is quantitative in nature, which makes it possible to obtain an X-ray of the current state of the publications on the subject (authors, number of publications, etc.), without delving into their content. Therefore, this research could be extended through an analysis of the content of the documents, allowing the results of existing studies in the scientific literature on a topic to be compiled, which would allow identifying the conceptual structure of the topic.