Abstract:

The aim of this study is to examine the keywords of scientific studies on health tourism in the international literature with the "Word Cloud Analysis" method, to determine the prominent concepts and to analyze the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on academic studies. As a result of the searches related to health tourism on the Web of Science database, 362 different international academic studies within the observation interval of 2006-2023 were accepted as the sample of the research. In order to examine the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the study sample was studied in two sub-periods, covering the pre-Covid-19 (2006-2019) and post-Covid-19 (2020-2023) periods. The results of single word analysis showed that concepts such as "destination, care, quality and service delivery" were frequently mentioned in the studies across the entire observation interval. As an effect of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was determined that concepts such as "globalization, policy, regulations" were replaced by "social, behavioral and motivational" concepts in the studies conducted before the pandemic. In terms of pattern expression analysis results, it was observed that there was a decline in country-specific studies after the Covid-19 pandemic and especially "innovation, trust, social media and cognitive" concepts were the subject of the studies. In the results of the comparative analysis between periods, the keywords "sustainability, nature/forest, pandemic and word of mouth" came to the fore as the keywords used for the first time in post-pandemic studies.

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