Demystifying dark tourism to develop a future agenda for research: a structured review with bibliometric and TCCM analysis

This study aims to conduct a systematic review of the literature on dark tourism to summarize the multiple studies under one paper and identify the latest trends that have influenced dark tourism. The paper uses various techniques of bibliometrics through the open-source R-based bibliometric tool and VOS viewer 1.6.18, along with the TCCM framework, to develop a more robust and novel approach to conducting the review. The results demonstrate the latest trends and continuous growth in dark tourism, including the most influential journals, authors, affiliations, countries, and most co-cited authors, prominent themes in this field, trending topics, publication trends, source growth of journals, theories, variables, methodology, and context. TCCM was used to understand the theories, contexts, characteristics, and methodologies studied till the present year, which helps to develop a future research agenda. The current study also identified a few areas that are still in the nascent stage and require attention in future research, such as investigating the multidisciplinary character of dark tourism, the commonalities and dissimilarities between various kinds of dark tourist destinations, and analyzing the bibliographic profiles of websites connected to genocide tourism, catastrophe tourism, and war-related tourism.