The main paths of medical tourism: From transplantation to beautification

•We collect and analyze 392 medical tourism related academic papers.•The main path analysis reveals two major medical tourism research streams.•Ethics and risks related to organ transplantation are largely discussed.•Economic and marketing issues need more discussion.•Beautification appears to be the potential growing segment.

Medical tourism, combining the very polarized purposes of pleasurable travel and potentially stressful health care services, is an emergent and growing business worldwide. Medical tourism patients are willing to travel abroad to seek better quality, lower cost, domestically unavailable, no wait-time destinations for non-emergency medical care. There are numerous related studies in the academic literature that are substantiated with multidisciplinary and diverse backgrounds. This study uses the main path analysis, a unique quantitative and citation-based approach, to analyze the significant development trajectories, important literature, and recent active research areas in medical tourism. We find that there are two distinctive development paths: one path focuses more on the evolution of medical tourism, the motivation factors, marketing strategies, and economic analysis; the other path emphasizes organ transplant and related issues. These two paths eventually merge to a common node in the citation network, which foretells transplantation to beautification as the future research direction trend.

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