Metatheorizing Regional Tourism: A Meta-analysis Report

Considering the growing number of research articles published on regional planning and tourism worldwide, and the fact that it appears impossible for the researchers to review all of them in detail, it is necessary to analyze the studies conducted in this field whatsoever. Moreover, as meta-analysis has recently been welcomed by Iranian researchers, it seems that in a near future, a considerable number of studies on urban and regional planning would apply meta-analysis as their research method. Therefore, this study sought to examine, based on the PRISMA statement, the reports of meta-analysis studies on regional planning published in both Iranian and Non-Iranian journals. To this end, all Iranian and Non-Iranian journals (in Persian and English) in the field of regional planning indexed during the last decade with the subject of regional tourism by such databases as Magiran, SID (Scientific Information Database, affiliated with the Academic Center for Education Culture and Research), Google Scholar, and IranDoc (Iranian Research Institute for Information Science and Technology) were examined, using meta-analysis and tourism as keywords for searching through the aforementioned databases, resulting in the identification of 38 relevant articles. Then, 13 articles were selected based on predetermined criteria, whose data were analyzed based on the PRISMA statement using descriptive statistics. The study’s findings indicated the examined meta-analysis articles were acceptably compatible with the criteria set by the PRISMA statement in terms of overall quality. Moreover, it was found that 38% percent of the articles lacked expected methodological quality. Also, the quality of the meta-analysis studies reported in the field of regional tourism was found to be moderate.