Bibliometric Analysis on Chinese Tour Guiding Research 2000–2025

The guided tour industry in China has evolved much since the turn of the century, with many new developments that have caused tremendous changes of Chinese tourists’ travel patterns. The pandemic has further accelerated the evolution in addition to technological advancement. While Chinese tour guiding studies continue to flourish, little is known about how this realm of knowledge production has evolved. The current article presents a bibliometric analysis of 117 peer-reviewed articles related to Chinese tour guiding from January 2000 to April 2025. The findings indicate that ‘guides’ service quality,’ ‘satisfaction,’ ‘performance,’ and ‘behavior’ remain hotspots in Chinese tour guiding research while ‘covid-19,’ ‘storytelling’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ are emergent research spheres. The paper also demonstrates how ‘covid-19,’ ‘artificial intelligence,’ and their convergent impact may have influenced the Chinese tour guiding industry and related research. Such findings supplement the existing review papers by highlighting the evolving production of knowledge in a Chinese tour guiding context.