Empirical Research on Creative Tourism: A Systematic Review

• Autor(a) principal: Akdemir, Hilal
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: Sousa de São José, José Manuel, Rodrigues Gonçalves, Alexandra
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34624/rtd.v41i0.30537

The empirical research on creative tourism (CT) is expanding, having already reached a considerable volume and diversity. This created the need for undertaking literature reviews, which provide an exploration of the development trajectory of this field of research. Nevertheless, there is no detailed “map” of the empirical research on CT, which provide us thorough information on various aspects that structure this field of research, such as research methods, research settings and participants, and main themes addressed in the conclusions. This systematic review aims to provide such a “map”, critically discussing it and making some recommendations for future research. Relevant publications were searched in EBSCO, Web of Science, and Science Direct electronic databases on 3rd of February 2021. All peer-reviewed articles, published since 2000, reporting empirical studies explicitly focused on CT and written in English, Portuguese and Spanish were included, among the identified publications, 60 were eligible for this review. The results of this systematic review show that empirical research on CT, despite being diversified and contributing to a better understanding of this phenomenon, still has some shortcomings that compromise its level of maturity. To reach higher levels of maturity, this research needs to overcome its excessive focus on issues related to the management of CT projects, its fixation around the initial definition of CT, as well as to break with the circumscription to urban and local settings and the scarce inclusion of artisans/artists and residents as research participants. It is also important to invest in more robust studies from a methodological point of view, which seek to carry out more complex and in-depth analyses, discuss ethical aspects more explicitly, and be more reflexive about their limitations.