An Analysis of the Most Influential Articles Published in Tourism Journals From 2000 to 2007: A Google Scholar Approach

Abstract

This research note reports a study that analyzed the 100 most influential articles, which is operationalized as the most cited publications published in tourism journals from 2000 to 2007. A Google Scholar-based software system was developed in Java to retrieve the citation information. The empirical findings show that 10.16% of the citations were from Institute for Scientific Information-listed (ISI) journals, and that 71.64% of them were from neither ISI nor tourism journals. The most popular topics covered by these articles were psychology and tourist behavior, followed by destination image and marketing. This article contributes to the literature by providing an alternative means of assessing the impact of research into tourism.

Environmental management research in hospitality

“…Google Scholar was selected, as it is a component of Google, the world's leading search engine, which indexes scholarly articles, books and dissertations from different databases (Law et al, 2009). Google Scholar was also identified as an important new source for citation analysis (Harzing and van der Wal, 2008), thus gaining the attention of academic researchers.…”

Diversity in Statistical Research Techniques: An Analysis of Refereed Research Articles in theJournal of Travel & Tourism MarketingBetween 1992 and 2010

“…While several studies on analytic methods have been conducted (Baloglu & Assante, 1999;Law et al, 2009;Lu & Nepal, 2009;Mazanec et al, 2010;Svensson, Svaeri, & Einarsen, 2009), few use a temporal framework to examine the usage trends of analytic methods. The recent inclusion of JTTM as one of the SSCI-listed journals in the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) lists (Thomson Reuters, 2011) justifies JTTM's high quality and its selection for analysis.…”

“…However, such studies generally do not focus either on tourism marketing or the analysis of the statistical methods applied. Law et al (2009) identify the 100 most influential tourism articles published between 2000 and 2008 using Google Scholar citation counts. Their study introduces a new methodological approach, but its emphasis is on the topics of the papers, not the statistical methods applied.…”

An insight into research performance through a citation counting analysis

“…These six journals included three hospitality journals: Cornell Hospitality Quarterly (CQ) their highly perceived quality, these six journals are commonly considered the most prestigious journals in hospitality and tourism. Law, Ye, Chen, and Leung (2009) as well as McKercher (2012) found that articles in these journals received the most citations. The studies in these journals should thus strongly influence future research.…”