Figure 1.
Research process workflow
Source: Own elaboration.
Figure 2.
Number of publications by year
Source: Own elaboration.
Table 1.
Journals most often publishing articles reporting findings of services research using UGC
| Journal | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sustainability (Switzerland) | 2 | 8 | 11 | 5 | 14 | 40 | ||||||
| International Journal of Hospitality Management | 1 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 12 | 6 | 6 | 34 | |||
| International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management | 1 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 5 | 6 | 9 | 29 | |||
| Tourism Management | 1 | 1 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 23 | |||
| Decision Support Systems | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 10 | ||||||
| Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 8 | |||||
| Journal of Business Research | 2 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 8 | |||||||
| Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 7 | |||||||
| Electronic Commerce Research and Applications | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 7 | ||||||
| International Journal of Culture, Tourism, and Hospitality Research | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 7 | ||||||
| Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management | 4 | 1 | 2 | 7 | ||||||||
| Tourism Management Perspectives | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 7 | ||||||
| Journal of Hospitality Marketing and Management | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 6 | |||||||
| Journal of Travel Research | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 6 | |||||||
| Current Issues in Tourism | 3 | 1 | 2 | 6 | ||||||||
| Industrial Management and Data Systems | 1 | 4 | 5 | |||||||||
| International Journal of Information Management | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 | ||||||
| Journal of Quality Assurance in Hospitality and Tourism | 2 | 1 | 2 | 5 |
[i] Source: Own elaboration. UGC, user-generated content.
Table 2.
Most-published authors
| S. No. | Author | Affiliation | Number of publications |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Xu Xun | Department of Management, Operations, and Marketing, California State University, Turlock, CA, USA | 13 |
| 2 | Law Rob | Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China | 9 |
| 3 | Rita Pablo | ISCTE-IUL, Business Research Unit (BRU-IUL), Lisbon, Portugal | 9 |
| 4 | Li Hengyun | School of Hotel and Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China | 8 |
| 5 | Li Yong-Hai | Department of E-commerce, Henan University of Technology, Zhengzhou, China | 7 |
| 6 | Nilashi, Mehrbakhsh | Centre for Global Sustainability Studies (CGSS), Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800, USM Penang, Malaysia | 7 |
| 7 | Borghi Matteo | Henley Business School, University of Reading, Greenlands, Henley on Thames, Oxfordshire, UK | 6 |
| 8 | Brochado Ana | SCTE-IUL, University Institute of Lisbon, Centre for Socioeconomic and Territorial Studies (DINÂMIA’CET — IUL) & Business Research Unit (BRU-IUL), Lisbon, Portugal | 6 |
| 9 | Chatterjee Swagato | IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur, West Bengal, India | 6 |
| 10 | Kim Hak-Seon | School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Kyungsung University, 309 Suyoungro, Nam-Gu, Busan, South Korea | 6 |
| 11 | Mariani Marcello | Henley Business School, University of Reading Greenlands, Henley on Thames Oxfordshire, UK | 6 |
| 12 | Moro Sérgio | University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL), ISTAR-IUL, Lisbon, Portugal | 6 |
| 13 | Samad Sarminah | Department of Business Administration, Collage of Business and Administration, Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University, Saudi Arabia | 6 |
| 14 | Bala, Pradip Kumar | Indian Institute of Management Ranchi, Suchana Bhawan, 5th Floor, Audrey House Campus, Meur's Road, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India | 5 |
| 15 | Gao Baojun | Economics and Management School, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China | 5 |
| 16 | Ray Arghya | Indian Institute of Management Ranchi, Suchana Bhawan, 5th Floor, Audrey House Campus, Meur's Road, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India | 5 |
| 17 | Teichert Thorsten | Marketing and Innovation, Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany | 5 |
| 18 | Ye Qiang | Harbin Institute of Technology, China | 5 |
[i] Source: Own elaboration.
Figure 3.
Co-authors’ clusters
Source: Own elaboration with VOSviewer.
Table 3.
Number of articles by country represented by authors
| Country | Number of publications |
|---|---|
| USA | 162 |
| China | 103 |
| UK | 42 |
| India | 34 |
| South Korea | 22 |
| Hong Kong | 21 |
| Taiwan | 21 |
| Germany | 17 |
| Canada | 14 |
| Australia | 13 |
| France | 12 |
| Italy | 11 |
| Spain | 11 |
| Malaysia | 9 |
| Singapore | 9 |
| Netherlands | 5 |
| Portugal | 5 |
[i] Source: Own elaboration.
Table 4.
Citation clusters by country
| Cluster 1 | Cluster 2 | Cluster 3 | Cluster 4 | Cluster 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Austria | Czechia | China | Australia | Belgium |
| Costa Rica | France | Hong Kong | Germany | Canada |
| Finland | Iraq | India | Poland | Israel |
| Iceland | Ireland | Japan | Portugal | Qatar |
| Iran | Malaysia | Morocco | Sweden | Russian Federation |
| Italy | Saudi Arabia | Puerto Rico | Switzerland | USA |
| Malta | Spain | Singapore | United Arab Emirates | |
| Netherlands | Tunisia | South Korea | ||
| Norway | Turkey | |||
| Taiwan | ||||
| UK | ||||
| Vietnam |
[i] Source: Own elaboration with VOSviewer. Minimum number of articles from a country — 1; minimum number of citations — 1.
Table 5.
Service industries targeted in the articles
| Industry | Number of articles |
|---|---|
| Tourism (hotels; hostels; rental services; bed and breakfast) | 293 |
| Restaurant | 53 |
| Transport (airlines; public transport) | 37 |
| Other (different) | 37 |
| Healthcare | 28 |
| Airport services | 8 |
| Banking services | 3 |
| Convenience stores, shops, retail | 3 |
| Logistics and supply chain | 3 |
| Audiobook, film streaming | 2 |
| Education | 2 |
| Escort services | 2 |
| Fitness | 2 |
| Public libraries | 2 |
| Air pollution protecting | 1 |
| Circular services | 1 |
| Convention centres | 1 |
| Crowdsourcing | 1 |
| Digital gaming | 1 |
| Insurance | 1 |
| Interpreting services | 1 |
| IT services | 1 |
| Self-services electronic vehicles | 1 |
| Telecommunication | 1 |
[i] Source: Own elaboration with MaxQDA; in some cases, the authors analysed multiple industries, and therefore the sum of articles in the table exceeds the study's total number of publications.
Table 6.
Data analysis methods and their co-occurrence in articles
[i] Source: Own elaboration with MaxQDA. LSTM, long short-term memory; NLP, natural language processing; TOPSIS, Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution.
Figure 4.
Clusters of research methods
Source: Own elaboration with MaxQDA.
Figure 5.
Keywords co-occurrence
Source: Own elaboration with VOSviewer.
Table 7.
Keywords clusters
| Cluster 1 — Customer satisfaction | Cluster 2 — SM analysis | ||||||
| Keywords | Links | Total link strength | Occurrences | Keywords | Links | Total link strength | Occurrences |
| Airline industry | 31 | 42 | 9 | Consumer behaviour | 21 | 28 | 5 |
| Artificial intelligence | 28 | 38 | 9 | Customer engagement | 13 | 16 | 5 |
| Big data | 55 | 102 | 17 | Decision-making | 37 | 70 | 14 |
| Competitiveness | 28 | 32 | 5 | Electronic commerce | 25 | 39 | 9 |
| Customer experience | 30 | 56 | 8 | Empirical analysis | 15 | 17 | 5 |
| Customer satisfaction | 68 | 197 | 47 | Hospitals | 17 | 22 | 5 |
| Detection method | 26 | 30 | 5 | Hotels | 33 | 79 | 17 |
| Hospitality industry | 55 | 95 | 17 | Human | 22 | 38 | 10 |
| Life satisfaction | 40 | 74 | 9 | Information systems | 6 | 8 | 5 |
| Literature review | 51 | 98 | 13 | Sales | 44 | 113 | 19 |
| Marketing | 45 | 68 | 12 | Service provider | 15 | 22 | 5 |
| Natural language processing | 14 | 17 | 5 | Social media | 72 | 178 | 43 |
| Network analysis | 32 | 47 | 6 | Social networking (online) | 34 | 74 | 16 |
| Online review | 67 | 166 | 45 | Text mining | 75 | 241 | 65 |
| Perception | 63 | 144 | 24 | 11 | 14 | 5 | |
| Performance assessment | 28 | 33 | 6 | ||||
| Profitability | 15 | 17 | 5 | ||||
| Psychology | 29 | 51 | 7 | ||||
| Qualitative analysis | 32 | 42 | 7 | ||||
| Questionnaire survey | 35 | 53 | 8 | ||||
| Regression analysis | 28 | 42 | 7 | ||||
| Restaurant | 18 | 22 | 8 | ||||
| Semantic network analysis | 33 | 63 | 8 | ||||
| Service sector | 35 | 49 | 11 | ||||
| Strategic approach | 23 | 31 | 5 | ||||
| Sustainability | 31 | 45 | 7 | ||||
| Sustainable development | 40 | 68 | 10 | ||||
| World Wide Web | 50 | 85 | 13 | ||||
| Cluster 3 — Services quality | Cluster 4 — Tourist destinations and companies management | ||||||
| Keywords | Links | Total link strength | Occurrences | Keywords | Links | Total link strength | Occurrences |
| China | 46 | 76 | 13 | Airbnb | 36 | 65 | 16 |
| Consumption behaviour | 49 | 90 | 14 | Culture | 21 | 25 | 8 |
| COVID-19 | 21 | 33 | 9 | Hospitality | 16 | 20 | 8 |
| Data set | 31 | 46 | 6 | Hotel attributes | 13 | 19 | 5 |
| Deep learning | 18 | 28 | 7 | Netnography | 15 | 18 | 6 |
| Latent Dirichlet allocation | 37 | 64 | 14 | Portugal | 18 | 23 | 6 |
| Machine learning | 56 | 114 | 26 | Satisfaction | 47 | 75 | 20 |
| Numerical model | 37 | 53 | 9 | Topic modelling | 13 | 17 | 6 |
| Peer-to-peer accommodation | 24 | 32 | 5 | Tourism | 49 | 102 | 24 |
| Quality control | 29 | 55 | 8 | Tourism development | 23 | 28 | 6 |
| Quality of service | 26 | 44 | 6 | Tourism management | 34 | 58 | 13 |
| Service quality | 81 | 266 | 58 | Tourism market | 21 | 29 | 5 |
| Servqual | 19 | 28 | 6 | Tourist behaviour | 44 | 95 | 17 |
| Sharing economy | 39 | 75 | 17 | Tourist destination | 37 | 64 | 12 |
| Social network | 21 | 23 | 5 | Travel behaviour | 38 | 71 | 13 |
| Statistics | 23 | 31 | 5 | ||||
| Text analytics | 28 | 41 | 11 | ||||
| Topic model | 16 | 19 | 5 | ||||
| Topic modelling | 37 | 56 | 10 | ||||
| United States | 40 | 59 | 10 | ||||
| Cluster 5 — Data mining in hotel industry | Cluster 6 — Sentiment analysis | ||||||
| Keywords | Links | Total link strength | Occurrences | Keywords | Links | Total link strength | Occurrences |
| Big data analytics | 16 | 20 | 6 | Comparative study | 21 | 27 | 5 |
| Data mining | 75 | 215 | 39 | Content analysis | 34 | 52 | 17 |
| Hotel | 33 | 55 | 10 | Google maps | 13 | 17 | 5 |
| Hotel industry | 61 | 177 | 37 | Sentiment analysis | 80 | 242 | 68 |
| Internet | 75 | 220 | 38 | Service evaluation | 16 | 19 | 5 |
| Language | 37 | 53 | 10 | Text analysis | 28 | 37 | 10 |
| Online hotel reviews | 24 | 34 | 8 | ||||
| Online ratings | 11 | 16 | 9 | ||||
| Review helpfulness | 11 | 16 | 5 | ||||
| Tripadvisor | 30 | 52 | 20 | ||||
| United Kingdom | 16 | 27 | 5 | ||||
[i] Source: Own elaboration with VOSviewer. SM, social media.