UNLOCKING RELIGIOUS TOURISM IN INDIA FOR RESEARCH- A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS

Objective: The primary objective of the paper is to critically analyze studies on religious tourism in India. The specific research objectives (RO) are to Analyze Religious tourism in India by extracting the publication trends, along with the countries and the contribution of the institutions to this stream of knowledge; Identifying the most productive authors, along with the emerging themes in the research; Enabling the study of the most cited and relevant papers in the field of Religious Tourism in India. Design/Methodology/Approach: The paper analyzes the research undertaken in the field of religious tourism in India. For this purpose, bibliometric analysis has been applied to qualitatively analyze the papers in this field. The data was extracted from the Scopus database, which yielded 135 related research records. Findings: The overall study of the field reveals that religious tourism of Christianity receives the most focus by the researchers and the other religions are less researched in terms of tourism. However religious tourism in India is expected to gain momentum with the inauguration of Ram mandir in Ayodhya. Religious tourism in India has been forecasted to rise steeply and would require all the aspects including sustainability, economic impact, ecological balance, commercialization, consumerism in religious tourism, and impact of pandemic; to be studied emphatically. Originality/Value: The present study is the bibliometric analysis of religious tourism in India. The study is original and provides an insight of the publication trend accompanied by core themes, collaborations, and the most cited and relevant publications in the field have been highlighted in this study. The study also points to the scope of work in this area in future.