Internet of Things (IoT) in smart tourism: a literature review

Purpose Although there has been a significant amount of research on Smart Tourism, the articles have not yet been combined into a thorough literature review that can examine research streams and the scope of future research. The purpose of this study is to examine the literature on the impact of deploying the Internet of Things (IoT) in tourism sector development to attract more visitors using a text mining technique and citation based bibliometric analysis for the first time. Design/methodology/approach This study uses R programming to do a full-text analysis of 36 publications on IoT in tourism and visualization of similarities viewer software to conduct a bibliometric citation analysis of 469 papers from the Scopus database. Aside from that, the documents were subjected to a longitudinal study using Excel and word frequency using a trending topic using the R-tool. Findings Results from the bibliometric study revealed the networks that exist in the literature of Tourism Management. With the use of log-likelihood, the findings from text mining identified nine theme models on the basis of relevancy, which is presented alongside an overview of the existing papers and a list of the primary authors with posterior probability using latent Dirichlet allocation. Originality/value This study examines tourism literature in which IoT plays a significant role. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to combine text mining with a bibliometric review. It significantly analyzes and discusses the impact of technology in the tourism sector development on attracting tourists while presenting the most important and frequently discussed topics and research in these writings. These findings provide researchers, tourism managers and technology professionals with a complete understanding of e-tourism and to provide smart devices to attract tourists.