Tourism as the Subject of Research in Doctoral and Habilitation Proceedings in the Field of ‘Physical Culture Sciences’

The aim of the study was to identify doctoral and postdoctoral dissertations that were created between 2003 and 2023 and based on tourism research, and the promotion procedures were conducted within the discipline of ‘Physical Culture Sciences’ (PCS). An attempt was made to identify the connections between such theses and other fields/disciplines of science and the methodological approaches used in them. The conducted research was empirical in nature, and its result is the opinions of the authors of 119 doctoral theses and 42 postdoctoral dissertations addressing tourism issues on the scientific disciplines within which these works were located. An attempt was also made to estimate the contribution that PCS had in their creation. The research results revealed strong connections between ‘tourism’ Ph.D. and postdoctoral theses completed in the PCS discipline, especially with the fields of ‘Social Sciences’ and ‘Humanities’. The results also allowed for determining and performing multi-aspect analyses regarding the methodological profiles of the examined works, visualising such profiles in the form of radar charts, which included information on their 16 most important methodological features. In the research, it was shown that doctoral and postdoctoral dissertations devoted to tourism issues completed within the discipline of PCS are characterised by great diversity concerning the applied methodological approaches. They are largely multi-/inter-disciplinary in nature, and the doctoral theses are dominated by empirical methods focused on cultural research. At the same time, these profiles are strongly diversified depending on the other field of science to which the works formally assigned to the PCS are related. The research results presented in this article suggest that typical bibliometric analyses regarding the disciplinary structure of advance tourism research fail to capture the diversity and methodological specificity of research conducted within various scientific disciplines. This necessitates further research, particularly empirical studies identifying their methodological profiles and demonstrating their differences. These studies can be a valuable source of information not only for methodological refinement and improving the quality of tourism research, but may also provide a basis for discussion on the placement of PCS in the classification of sciences and the role that tourism research should play within this discipline.