Tourism has become one of the main sectors in promoting the economic development of localities and job creation. Given the magnitude and projection of tourism activity, it represents a high risk for the geographic space where it is developed and sustainability in the sector is an increasingly perceptible global challenge. In this sense, the academic community has paid special interest in recent years to research associated with sustainability in tourism. The present study seeks to describe the state of the construct based on the analysis of bibliometric indicators of productivity, dispersion and visibility or impact, as well as a visualization of the networks of authorial and institutional collaboration and a temporal analysis of the lines of research or fundamental thematic axes. The main results show a progressive increase in the number of research studies, a high dispersion of scientific production, as well as a collaborative network dominated almost entirely by the most notable authors. The research allows us to characterize the state of the art of the construct and provides researchers with important bibliometric information to guide future studies.