Reconciling neologisms and the need for precision in tourism epistemology

Generating and advancing knowledge in tourism can entail the emergence of neologisms: new terms are coined to describe new realities. Given the interdisciplinary and pluralistic nature of tourism epistemology, stakeholders from diverse academic and non-academic domains tend to contribute to generating knowledge, and to negotiating the semantics of neologisms. As a result, tourism neologisms can have diverse discipline and context-specific meanings. This, however, can pose challenges to tourism science, where precision and accuracy are key requirements. A lack of semantic precision can invalidate study results and hinder mutual comprehension in the field. Additionally, the pressure to publish and generate citations in academia can lead tourism scholars to work with neologisms whose meanings are still vague. In this paper, we show how tourism researchers have rushed to adopt the non-academic neologism ‘overtourism’, but frequently failed to contextualise its use or to contribute to a more precise conceptualisation of the term. Our analysis illustrates that this has adverse effects on the quality of the scholarly output. The paper concludes with recommendations for increased precision and accuracy for tourism researchers, lecturers, and journal editors.