This article aims to undertake a bibliometric review along with a conceptual and intellectual analysis of research on distance learning and e-learning. The purpose of this study is to focus on several academic fields and offer a comprehensive approach on how research on distance learning and e-learning has been approached since 1970. This work applies several bibliometric techniques to assess the research evolution of topics addressed, the most productive authors and the most influential journals. The findings revealed an exponential increase of publications over the last 20 years, highlighting the evolution of topics. The research themes include four main groups: the first relates to pedagogical processes in terms of effectiveness, outcomes, learning strategies, interaction, and self-regulation; the second group includes aspects associated with ICT applied in distance education; the third group focuses on the perceived value, usefulness, acceptance, and satisfaction of e-learning; and the last group portrays the forced application of distance learning strategies to deal with the consequences of the pandemic. This work contributes to expanding the existing literature devoted to study the structure of research on e-learning. It analyses the most representative authors, institutions, and documents, and gathers the growing literature on e-learning, from distance learning in the seventies until the implementation of online learning in the COVID-19 era.

Many tourism destinations are facing overtourism situations, where the increase in visitors negatively impacts on residents’ life. Even if the perceptions of overtourism amongst residents have been analysed, the use of that perception by other key stakeholders remains largely unexplored. The discursive co-optation of the concept of overtourism amongst supply-side stakeholders, governmental and civil society stakeholders, provide a unique insight to discuss the use of power through tourism-related discourses and to face societal challenges in tourism destinations. Taking Majorca (Spain) as a case study, we carry out semi-structured interviews to government officials, tourism suppliers (e.g., hoteliers, cruise companies, intermediaries, holiday rentals), NGOs and researchers, to analyse how the perception of overtourism is used by those actors to promote their own agenda, often in opposition to the interests of other stakeholders. The article offers a dual contribution: on the one hand, it shows how the term “overtourism” is co-opted by supply-side stakeholders to justify their own interests and strengthen their agendas. On the other hand, we argue that the lack of consensus on how to address overtourism shows the limits of stakeholder theory to solve societal challenges, and the need of perspectives of social justice to build consensuses around the issue of overtourism.

This article examines the relationship between tourism and education through a bibliometric analysis since 1950 in the field of hospitality, tourism, leisure, and education. The aim of the paper is offering an overview of the tourism and education binomial analyzing how research on education in the tourism sector has been approached; how general education is studied to understand the touristic processes and how tourism is considered a springboard to boost environmental, cultural, and social awareness. This study expands on the existing literature of studies including the past and present research contributions. The results reveal the most influential articles, the co-occurrence of author’s keywords, main topics addressed and the current areas of research, which are related to the influence of the educational background of individuals toward sustainable development and the role of tourism to sensitize stakeholders on sustainability.

This research aims at exploring the impact of active tourism activities on sustainable development dimensions. The methodology applied was based on the Theory of Forgotten Effects, which involves the use of different matrices as a research method representing relationship between different elements. According to experts’ opinions, direct and indirect relationships effects caused by active tourism on sustainable development dimensions were evaluated. Particularly, the elements in the matrices were, on the one hand, types of active tourism activities by natural setting (ground, underground, water, underwater and aerial) and, on the other hand, dimensions of sustainable development goals (economic, social, environmental, cultural and governmental). The use of the Forgotten Effects Theory allowed us to analyse incidence relationships, both direct causalities identified by experts in the first place, and also significant linkages between elements in the matrices which had been overlooked initially but showed a strong incidence after applying the aforementioned research method (indirect causalities). Besides this identification of overlooked incidences or “forgotten effects”, another remarkable contribution of this pioneer work is in the selection of themes or objects of study included in the fuzzy metrics, as no other work relating active tourism activities and sustainable development dimensions was found in the literature.

This document constitutes an overview of the research performed by authors whose main affiliation is in a European research institution, in the field of ‘tourism, leisure and hospitality’, since the first indexed publication in 1969. The method used includes measures, such as the most productive authors, institutions and countries, as well as relational techniques which depict results and allow for the analysis of the scientific and intellectual structure of the field, especially regarding the main topics addressed. Results show that Dimitrios Buhalis is the most productive author, authors from UK institutions are the most influential, UK and Spain are the most productive countries in terms of published articles and that the main topics addressed in the last decade refer to social media and climate change. Among the major implications are that it offers a retrospective overview of tourism research, contributes to the literature on research advances and it serves to identify the main research areas in this study.