A bibliometric analysis of social media in hospitality and tourism research

Abstract

Purpose While the importance of social media will continue to grow, the purpose of this study is to provide a retrospective systematic literature review of the social media research published in major hospitality and tourism journals over a specific time period. Design/methodology/approach The study conducted a bibliometric analysis to review the literature of 439 social media articles published in 51 hospitality and tourism journals over a 15-year time span (2002-2016). Findings Ulrike Gretzel authored the highest fractional citations. The results indicated that social media-related research was mostly published in top-tier journals. The International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management was amongst the four leading journals in terms of the percentage of published social media articles. While inter-country social media research collaborations were relatively modest, interestingly, inter-country collaborations have been steadily increasing in the past five years. Another finding indicated that social media research in hospitality and tourism journals has been predominantly quantitative. The results revealed six new areas within the consumer behaviour research theme, namely, eWOM, service recovery, customer satisfaction, brand/destination image and service quality. Finally, it is important to note that four new trends in social media research appeared between 2011 and 2016, namely, big data, netnography, Travel 2.0 and Web 2.0. Research limitations/implications While this study made significant contributions to the social media literature, some limitations do exist. For example, the current research excluded publications from major conferences, books, book chapters and dissertations. Additionally, it is not within the scope of this paper to take into account issues related to self-citations. Practical implications The results obtained from analysis contribute to a comprehensive understanding of social media research progress in hospitality and tourism. For example, evaluating the performance of individual scholars helps educational institutions to compete in the global university ranking system. Additionally, to compete for funding opportunities on the topic of social media, institutions can use citation counts to demonstrate their competitiveness. Furthermore, due to the expected future growth in the number of social media platforms, practitioners need to understand motivating factors and tourists’ needs in different countries, target market segments, age groups and cultures to create highly engaging communities around their brands. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the sample of this study synthesized the largest selection of social media articles published in hospitality and tourism journals. This is the first study to apply the fractional score at the author level, the adjusted appearance score at the university level and the average citation score at the journal and inter-country levels in the analysis. In addition, prevalent research orientations and research trends in social media made significant contributions to existing literature.

Developing a comprehensive life cycle framework for social media research in hospitality and tourism

“…In the general context of hospitality and tourism, a large number of systematic literature reviews have been conducted in the past few decades (Leung and Law, 2007;McKercher, 2008;Law et al, 2010;Park et al, 2011;Zheng and Gerritsen, 2014;Ruhanen et al, 2015;Bowen and Whalen, 2017;Whalen, 2018;Nusair et al, 2019). Ruhanen et al (2015) for example, conducted a 25-year bibliometric analysis for the four top-tier journals in tourism.…”

Reading between the lines: analyzing online reviews by using a multi-method Web-analytics approach

“…Earlier literature on tourism has largely explained the perceptions of humans toward a place or tourists using qualitative methods or psychometric models (Ali et al, 2019). Researchers had mainly focused on gathering data through survey methods; however, stakeholders in the tourism industry need to understand what tourists think about the destinations and how they feel about their experience of visit (Nusair, 2019). In the current research, data in the form of online reviews have been collected from travel websites.…”

Creation and dissemination of hospitality and tourism research outputs in the new millennium

“…After keyword analysis was applied in tourism studies for the first time (Palmer et al, 2005), bibliometric analysis became a widely accepted tool in analyzing the research network structure in various tourism-and hospitality-related fields, including sustainable tourism (Niñerola et al, 2019;Ruhanen et al, 2015), AirBnB (Andreu et al, 2020), psychology (Barrios et al, 2008), tourism crisis and disaster management (Jiang et al, 2017), food and gastronomy (Okumus et al, 2018), finances (Jiménez-Caballero and Polo Molina, 2017), wine tourism (S anchez et al, 2017), medical tourism (De La Hoz-Correa et al, 2018), self-service technology (Shin and Perdue, 2019), social media (Leung et al, 2017;Nusair et al, 2019) and strategic management . These bibliometric studies have adopted a number of analysis approaches, such as co-authorship, co-citation and co-word analyses.…”