From Knowledge Structure to Pathmaking Tourism Scholarship: Editorial Renewal and Future Research Directions in Enlightening Tourism

This editorial article maps the accumulated knowledge structure of Enlightening Tourism. A Pathmaking Journal (ET) and translates it into a forward-looking research agenda for the journal’s renewed editorial phase. The article is grounded in a corpus of 143 ET articles, organised into 53 pre-Scopus articles published between 2011 and 2017 and 90 Scopus-indexed articles published between 2018 and 2026. Author keywords were analysed through co-word analysis, keyword co-occurrence networks, Greedy Modularity clustering, robustness comparison with Louvain community detection, Callon strategic diagramming and Future Research Initiatives (FRI) simulations. This methodological integration represents a distinctive contribution of the paper: rather than using bibliometric mapping only to describe the journal’s past, it combines retrospective knowledge-structure analysis with forward-looking FRI simulations to identify under-connected concepts that may inform future research directions, editorial priorities and scholarly development. The results identify 565 unique keywords, 66 retained keywords occurring at least twice, 115 co-occurrence linkages and 11 thematic clusters. Tourism, satisfaction, sustainable tourism and sustainability emerge as basic themes; hotels, India and Antalya appear as niche themes; and sustainable development and COVID-19 occupy the emerging or declining quadrant. The FRI simulations indicate that destination image, tourism marketing, performance, customer satisfaction, travel motivation, perceived risk and smart destinations may operate as bridging concepts for future research. We argue that the next stage of ET should not be understood as a break with its past, but as a disciplined transformation of its accumulated knowledge into a clearer intellectual direction. Pathmaking tourism scholarship is proposed as a way of studying how destinations, firms, communities, ecosystems and institutions create, transform and govern responsible development pathways under conditions of uncertainty, technological change and societal transition. In this renewed phase, ET will prioritise manuscripts that move beyond tourism as an empirical setting and use tourism to advance theory, methods, evidence, policy and responsible practice