A global review of 50 years of polar tourism scholarship

Abstract

The first peer-reviewed journal article on polar tourism was published in French by Canada-based Louis-Edmond Hamelin in 1974, marking 2024 as the 50th anniversary of polar tourism scholarship. This presentation discusses the results obtained from a meta-review of journal articles (n=626) searched in 22 different languages and tracks the development of polar tourism scholarship over time (1974-2022). The meta-review employed a keyword search of two online scholarly databases (Scopus and Google Scholar) and other regionally relevant searches. We identified four main phases of polar tourism scholarship. The early days of research (1974- 1991) represented an ‘exploratory’ phase, with an average number of less than one publication annually. This initial period was followed by an ‘establishment’ phase (1992–2006), during which the average number of publications per year increased to nine. A ‘development’ phase (2007-2016) followed, in which polar tourism scholarship grew substantially and solidified at about 19 publications annually on average. The final phase (starting in 2017), labelled the ‘integration’ phase, witnessed the average yearly number of publications to be generally more than twice that of those during the development phase and were dominated by multi-authored and multi-disciplinary scholarship. Also, this recent phase is the most linguistically diverse, with 10 publication languages represented, although articles in English continue to dominate the polar tourism literature (almost 75%). This is a finding not well-explored in previous meta-reviews, and it represents a growing scholarly interest across national boundaries and beyond those states typically associated with polar tourism. The incorporation of articles published in languages other than English allows us to present for the first time a comprehensive and global overview of scholarly output on polar tourism. This linguistic diversity is critical to understanding polar tourism as its growth intensifies and diversifies.