Huixian Zhao

Elderly tourism constitutes an important sector within the sustainable development of the tourism industry, attracting an increasing body of research focused on market development. This study aims to outline the progression of elderly tourism research within the past five years (2019–2023) and determine prospective research trajectories and opportunities in the subject. Employing CiteSpace visual analysis technology, this investigation constructs knowledge graphs of authors, institutions, and countries from 332 English-language academic articles from the Web of Science and culminates a keyword co-occurrence knowledge graph. Next, cluster and burst analyses revealed the prevailing trends and focal points in elderly tourism research. The results underscore that while many researchers have been drawn to elderly tourism, the collaborative relationships between these scholars remain tenuous, resulting in the relatively disparate study and the absence of a lead author group. China dominates the field, producing a far greater quantity of studies than other nations. Hence, this study encourages different countries, higher education institutions and disciplines to strengthen cooperation in the management and development of elderly tourism, especially paying attention to the importance of elderly tourism services, quality management and technology integration for the sustainable development of elderly tourism.