ABSTRACT
Resilience is a term widely used in academic and policy literatures. A bibliometric analysis illustrates that the notion of resilience became utilized in tourism studies later than other fields. The main scale of analysis is at the community and destination level. The majority of tourism research adopts an engineering conception of resilience that assumes an equilibrium existing prior to disturbance, in contrast socio-ecological understandings of resilience that emphasize complexity and a number of potential multiple states in which the system could exist are evident in about 25 per cent of papers. Many authors have no idea. Nevertheless, understandings are crucial given the normative ways in which the concept is used.
