Abstract
Tourism is among the economic sectors which are most exposed to external shocks, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused international arrivals go down by roughly 74 per cent in 2020, brought this exposure into worldwide attention. In the years since, resilience has moved from the margins of the tourism literature to something close to its center, yet there is still a lack of a broad synthesis that traces how the concept itself has developed. The present study attempts to fill that gap. Drawing on 315 peer-reviewed articles retrieved from Scopus for the period 2004 to 2025, and using the Biblioshiny interface to the R Bibliometrix package, the study examines how output has grown year by year, which journals and authors have been most visible, where the work is being done and which themes cluster together. Three methods are combined: co-word analysis, thematic mapping and an investigation of citation networks. The single most notable pattern is temporal. Annual output rose from just 2 papers in 2007 to 72 in 2024, and approximately nine out of ten articles in the sample were published from 2020 onward. Alongside this surge, a gradual repositioning of the field was observed moving away from a narrow focus on reactive crisis response and toward a broader concern with building resilience before crises occur. The findings are intended to help researchers orient themselves in a quickly expanding body of work and to offer practitioners and policymakers a direction of where the evidence currently is concentrated.