Angling tourism: A state-of-the-art review

This paper represents a scoping review of angling tourism. Using the Google Scholar search engine and Scopus search, the paper reviews 98 journal articles on angling tourism in terms of year of publication, geographic locations of case studies, disciplinary foci, scientific fields and research themes. Studies on angling tourism focus on different facets of this tourism activity and comprise three major research themes: Angling tourism management, General angling tourism and Impacts both of and on angling tourism. This review shows that tourism studies and journals on tourism management/geography have, by and large, ignored angling tourism as a tourism activity across the globe, despite its significant contribution to the tourism economy. Future research on angling tourism development requires broadening the geographical scope of studies, understanding anglers as tourists with subsequent research from tourism studies perspectives, acquiring and mining of quality data for sustainable site-specific tourism offerings as well as focusing on the issues of global environmental change for implementing effective management and adaptation mechanisms. Significantly more studies are required to understand this tourism activity fully. The review supports the use of Google Scholar search as a reliable tool for accessing scientific publications.