Technological Innovation for Sustainable Tourism: A Bibliometric Study Through a Knowledge-Production Bias Lens

This study maps and diagnoses research on technological innovation for sustainable tourism through a knowledge production bias and governance lens. It analyses Scopus indexed journal articles published between 2010 and 2023 (N = 1,044), retrieved via seven TITLE-ABS-KEY queries, merged and deduplicated, and documented using an adapted PRISMA 2020 style flow. Retrieval validity was bounded through manual validation (precision = 74.0%) complemented by a two-coder check. VOSviewer science mapping used full counting and a minimum keyword occurrence threshold (min. occurrences = 5) to generate keyword co-occurrence, overlay visualisation (average publication year), and country and author co authorship networks supported by exported Items lists. The field shows strong growth and a conceptual structure centred on smart, digital, and AI related narratives embedded within broad sustainability framings. Collaboration networks indicate core and periphery visibility, and within the mapped country set the top five countries account for approximately 40% of both output and citations, indicating concentrated agenda visibility. Governance coded constructs appear less central in the high frequency conceptual core at the applied threshold, suggesting potential blind spots in linking innovation mechanisms to sustainability outcomes. Findings are bounded to publication metadata and mapped networks rather than destination performance or policy readiness, yet they provide actionable implications by highlighting the need to pair technology adoption with governance readiness, including measurement, transparency, and accountability, and to foreground fairness and responsibility considerations more explicitly in innovation agendas.