Narrative of Health Tourism Marketing Through Words

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant Professor of Management, Department of Management and Economics, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Golestan University, Gorgan, Iran.

Abstract

Context and Purpose: One of the main uses of text mining is to help discover hidden knowledge among various texts that business people seek to acquire. The current research aims to discover knowledge from the textual analysis of articles related to the field of health tourism marketing.
Design/methodology/approach: In the first step, a total of 456 articles between 2010 and 2024 were selected using the term "health tourism marketing" in databases and valid search engines. Through reviewing the title, abstract, and main text of the articles and in different stages of screening the articles, the researchers finally selected 42 articles related to the topic of health tourism marketing to perform the text mining process. In the second step, after pre-processing the data, using non-hierarchical cluster analysis, the number of 3 optimal clusters was obtained according to the Davies-Bouldin index, and a keyword was drawn for each cluster. Then, using the supporting indicators, the confidence and attractiveness of the associative rules of each cluster were extracted and analyzed. In the third step, using the results of the first and second steps, a fishbone diagram of the research was drawn and a summary of the results was presented in the form of a diagram.
Findings: Applying cluster analysis led to the placement of articles in three clusters based on the Davis-Bouldin index, in the zero, first, and second clusters respectively, the words service, patient and tourism occupied the centrality of the cluster and in order to provide a better view of the keywords of each cluster was drawn. The application of associative rules led to the identification of if-then rules separately for each cluster, from among thousands of extracted rules, 15 rules were presented separately for each cluster based on attractiveness, support, confidence, and experts' opinions.
Conclusion: Summarizing the results and designing the fishbone diagram showed that in order to exploit the benefits of health tourism, it is necessary to improve and optimally use natural, hard, soft and marketing infrastructures.
Originality/value: Conducting many researches in the field of health tourism shows the importance and micro-macro benefits of this field, so understanding and explaining the researches of this field through text mining can be the beginning of a way to exploit the knowledge accumulated in it.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

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Journal of Tourism Planning and Development
Volume 13, Issue 51
December 2025
Pages 141-168

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