与新冠疫情相关的旅游研究进展及学术贡献——基于10本英文期刊载文的分析

Assessing Research on the COVID-19 Pandemic and Tourism Published in English-language Journals:7Research Progress and Academic Contributions

新冠疫情给全球旅游业带来了巨大的冲击和挑战。在此背景下,英文期刊涌现出一大批与新冠疫情相关的旅游研究文献。虽然有学者对这些研究展开过批判性的思考,但对这一领域的最新进展和学术贡献却较少论及。基于对10本旅游类英文SSCI期刊所载文献(245篇论文,截至2021年8月31日)的分析,文章对与新冠疫情相关的旅游研究进展进行了梳理,并对这些研究的学术贡献做出了评价和解释。从研究主题看,现有研究集中在旅游者行为、新冠疫情在国家/地区层面、目的地层面以及企业/行业层面的影响及应对等方面。从研究取向看,定量研究占主导;与之相对应的是,问卷调查是数据收集的主要渠道。上述特征与当下国际旅游研究的趋势基本一致。从学术贡献看,虽然英文期刊已涌现出大量与新冠疫情相关的旅游研究,但它们主要还是:(1)应用现有理论来检验在新冠疫情情境下所假设的变量之间的关系,并未对现有理论框架、概念做出重大改变;(2)用现有理论解释新冠疫情背景下出现的新的旅游现象。期刊、学者、自由主义经济影响下的大学制度等因素都在不同程度上制约了与新冠疫情相关的旅游研究的理论贡献。

This article aims to address the adequacies of the preceding review studies, which have largely failed to systematically analyze the academic contributions(notably, theoretical and methodological contributions) made by the extant studies pertinent to COVID-19 and tourism. Specifically, we have collected up to 245 articles indexed in top 10 academic journals in the field of tourism studies,including Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management, Journal of Travel Research, Journal of Sustainable Tourism and so forth. The keywords used for search involve“COVID-19”“COVID”“pandemic”“epidemic”“coronavirus”and“corona virus”. The publication dates of the articles all fall somewhere between the start of the pandemic in January, 2020 and the 31st of August, 2021. Based upon the analysis framework proposed by authors, according to John Tribe’s essay, and that formulated by Colquitt and Zapata-Phelan, this article evaluates the extent to which the sampled studies have made a contribution to the extant theories and methodology related to tourism.As the research outcomes manifest, first, the extant studies could be categorized according to their research themes. Specifically, most research shed light on tourist behaviours and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism development, particularly on the national and destinational levels. In contrast, very few has reflected upon the changes in tourism as a discipline, in general, and the relevant research approaches, in specific. Second, roughly half of the sample articles are quantitative studies,most of which are in favour of either questionnaires or statistics. In contrast, qualitative studies only take a lesser share. Third, with respect to academic contribution, it is clear that significant theoretical contribution is rarely made in the sampled studies. Most are found oriented to solving real-world problems. This imbalance would, perhaps, pose a threat to the growing tourism research in the long run.The reasons are manifold, but we focus upon triple key human and nonhuman factors, namely, academics,academic journals, and the rule and regulations by institutions(e.g., universities), which might have conspired to manipulate the process of(co-)producing tourism knowledge. Thus, to solve practical questions in the real time has become popular among academics, who might be increasingly reluctant to spend sufficient time and energy on theory building itself. Nevertheless, theory building, after all, is vitally significant, not least because it arguably paves a base stone for the future of tourism research. As such, we suggest that the current tourism knowledge production system needs to be reformed,encouraging more academics in future to focus on the theoretical significance of their own studies.This article has some limitations, as we only target the articles indexed in the top 10 journals in tourism. It means that our research findings might be less representative than expected. Moreover, it might be better to evaluate respectively the significance of the studies in different tourism subjects, whose fabrics might vary from one to another. In so doing, more nuanced insights might be mobilized in this aspect, providing most useful guidance to other scholars with utmost interest in the production of tourism knowledge.