A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF MOBILE GUIDE APPLICATIONS

Mobile guide applications are changing the way tourists travel with their trip and activity recommendations, location-based personalized tours and instant access to the requested information. The aim of this study is to examine and evaluate the studies published on "mobile guide", which will closely affect the tour guiding profession, which is an important component of tourism, and to provide a bird's eye view for academicians who want to study in this field. In accordance with this purpose, bibliometric analysis method was preferred. Within the scope of the study, all articles, book chapters and papers written in English language in the Scopus database were filtered using the keyword "mobile guide" without any field and time limit, and in this way, the preliminary research of the study was completed. The distribution rates of the information obtained in the preliminary research according to years and fields, the frequency of keywords and the distribution of authors according to countries were examined by using the VOSviewer program. In the next stage of the study, information on 65 articles was tabulated in detail. When the studies were examined, it was seen that academics working in the fields of computer and information systems were predominant, while tourism academics did not show enough interest in the subject. It is thought that joint work in this field by tourism academics who have a good command of tourist behavior and academics who have a good command of information systems and work in the field of engineering will improve the quality of publications.