From Image Formation to Image Circulation: A Bibliometric-Systematic Review of Tourism Destination Image in the Digital Era

Destination-image theory explains how information sources and personal factors shape cognitive-affective evaluations, yet platformised media have changed who produces destination representations, how those representations become visible, and how post-consumption content re-enters the pre-consumption information environment. This review examines whether the field's digital turn can still be represented adequately as image formation alone. A Web of Science Core Collection search conducted on 26 September 2026 retrieved 537 records; document-type and title/abstract screening yielded a 230-paper analytical corpus. Performance analysis, co-citation, bibliographic coupling, cleaned keyword co-occurrence, methodological-evolution profiling, non-negative matrix factorisation of titles and abstracts, and a stratified 40-paper interpretive synthesis were combined. Three intellectual foundations and four current research fronts were identified. The evidence shows continuity in classic image-formation constructs alongside a shift towards platform-mediated branding, user-generated content, eWOM, visual/multimodal representation, and AI-enabled measurement. Text mining/NLP increased from 12.1% of papers in 2014-2018 to 25.9% in 2023-2026/27, while machine-learning/deep-learning/AI approaches increased from 0% to 22.4%. However, platform mechanisms and AI are more often treated as settings or analytical tools than as constitutive mediators and actors. We therefore propose the Digital Destination Image Circulation (DDIC) framework, which nests classic formation mechanisms within a recursive process linking image producers, representation, platform mediation, image transformation, audience filters, and outcomes/feedback. DDIC reframes destination-image management from message projection towards the diagnosis and governance of image circulation.