A Ranking of International Tourism and Hospitality Journals

Abstract

Attempts to assess the quality of academic publications have been increasing lately. Due to the number of existing journals, it is hard to make a representative selection and to find criteria for determining quality. Hence, questions arise, including what sort of journals are more important in terms of reputation, readership frequency, and relevance to scientific research and practice. Recent studies on journal rankings have been carried out on the basis of both objective data (citation counts) and the quality perceptions of experts. This study attempts a rating of tourism and hospitality journals among the scientific community according to the journals’ readership frequency, scientific and practical relevance, overall reputation, and the importance of being published in the journals to the academic career of the respondents.

Online travel purchasing: A literature review

“…However, many authors argue that impact factors should not be used to evaluate research (Jamal, Smith, & Watson, 2008;Seglen, 1997). The leading journals included in this study were the top 10 selected from four tourism and hospitality journal rankings listed in the studies of Pechlaner, Zehrer, Matzler, and Abfalter (2004), Ryan (2005) Table 1). Moreover, the 2-year impact factors from SSCI were also considered to select leading journals.…”

Themes and Trends in Australian and New Zealand Tourism Research: A Social Network Analysis of Citations in Two Leading Journals (1994–2007)

“…These two journals were selected for several reasons but represent a convenience sample, because they are the only tourism journals that have been included in WoS over a number of years. Somewhat fortuitously, these two journals are also prominent and influential publication outlets in the field of tourism, with a number of studies over the last 19 years consistently ranking these titles among the top three most influential journals (McKercher et al, 2006;Pechlaner et al, 2004;Ryan, 2005;Sheldon, 1990;Zehrer, 2007). Supplementary analysis was conducted in August 2008 using Google Scholar and the software package Publish or Perish to better understand the relative influence of these two tourism journals.…”

“…Qualitative relational techniques such as literature reviews, meta-analyses and content analyses are common in tourism and have been used to investigate key themes (Hsu & Yeung, 2003;McKercher et al, 2006;Pechlaner et al, 2004;Schmidgall, Woods, & Hardigree, 2007;Sheldon, 1990;Zehrer, 2007) Expert panels (Ferreira, DeFranco, & Rappole, 1994, 1998 Literature reviews…”

“…In a mature field, various forms of 'score-keeping' are undertaken to investigate the most productive and influential scholars, institutions and publications. As a result there has been renewed interest in assessing and ranking tourism journals based on both perceived quality and influence (Jamal, Smith, & Watson, 2008;McKercher, Law, & Lam, 2006;Pechlaner, Zehrer, Matzler, & Abfalter, 2004;Ryan, 2005). This interest has extended to the ranking of individual academics and institutions based on publication and citation counts (Jogaratnam, Chon et al, 2005;McKercher, 2007McKercher, , 2008Zhao & Ritchie, 2007).…”

Publishing in the Journal of Travel Research

“…Many junior professors really do not understand what happens to a manuscript after it is submitted; how the review process works; and what to expect from that process (Gilmore, Carson, and Perry 2006). While numerous articles exist ranking different research journals (Frechtling 2004;Pechlaner et al 2004), ranking different institutions based on publishing frequency (Jogaratnam et al 2005), and even ranking individual authors based on publishing frequency (Zhao and Ritchie 2007), very little research exists on the publication process. There have been studies reporting content analyses of various journals over time (Xiao and Smith 2006), but even these tend to focus more on the evolution of various topics and methodologies as opposed to the process of publication.…”