Tourism citations in other disciplines

Abstract

Tourism publication and citation patterns have been analysed repeatedly: most recently, by Hall (2011), Benckendorff and Zehrer (2013), Fennell (2013), and Xin, Tribe, and Chambers (2013). Initially there were few researchers or journals, and ideas and information were largely imported from other disciplines. This has continued, but as tourism research expanded, it also became increasingly self-referential. Here we examine whether it has entered a third phase, with outward citations in other academic disciplines: a key criterion for a mature field of study. For comparison, economics research examines how humans allocate resources, and is cited across many other disciplines. Tourism research examines how humans move around, which a priori seems equally fundamental. Here, therefore, we test how widely tourism research is cited in non-tourism journals. All searches were conducted during 2012 and 2013.We used a rationally efficient search strategy to answer this question robustly and reliably. It might theoretically be possible to search the world's entire electronic literature for all citations of all articles in all tourism journals, but this would be very inefficient. Our strategy involved two steps. The first step used an iterative approach to identify the tourism journals most often cited in other disciplines. Part of this iteration involved the identification of nontourism disciplines most commonly cross-cited cited with tourism. This step is a precaution, required since the impact factors of tourism journals are derived largely from citations of articles in other tourism journals. Thus, IFs of tourism journals may not accurately identify the journals cited most often in non-tourism journals. This step does not generate final data. It is simply to ensure that the second step captures the dense part of the dataset, the fat body rather than the long tail, because that determines the reliability of the overall result. In the second step, we compiled and analysed all citations in non-tourism journals, for all articles published in highly-cited tourism journals. This is the step which generated our primary data.

Adventure Tourism as a Research Tool in Non-Tourism Disciplines

“…The consequence of these pressures is that whilst tourism research was indeed established as a recognized academic discipline as well as a multidisciplinary field, in the process it became very self-referential (Wardle and Buckley 2014). Indeed, it fragmented into even more self-referential sub-segments, with almost entirely disjunct literatures of tourism and leisure, events and hospitality, sport and recreation.…”

“…Patterns and rankings in tourism research, the use of tourism knowledge, and priorities for future tourism research have been explored extensively (Xiao and Smith 2007;Pearce 2009;Hall 2011;Benckendorff and Zehrer 2013;Chang and McAleer 2012;Fennell 2013;Xin et al 2013;Wardle and Buckley 2014;Williams et al 2012). The first modem tourism researchers originated in other academic disciplines, and applied the mindsets, methodologies and research literatures of their primary disciplines within the tourism sector.…”

“…Particularly if we include travel and tourism more broadly, the field essentially examines how and why people move from place to place. As noted by Wardle and Buckley (2014), there 40 is no fundamental reason why this should be any less significant than studying how people amass, trade and expend resources, studied under the heading of economics; or how they establish social rules of behaviour and resolve resulting conflicts, studied under the heading of law. Overall, Wardle and Buckley (2014) argue that for tourism research to enter a third phase, where findings published in tourism journals are also exported for citation in other disciplines, we need to identify and address tourism research questions whose answers also apply beyond the confines of tourism.…”

“…This did have the advantage that researchers in other disciplines became aware, even if only to a small degree, of the existence of tourism research. To date, however, this has not yet lead to any significant outflow of insights or information from tourism journals to other disciplines (Wardle and Buckley 2014). This is not in itself surprising, if we think of tourism simply as an industry sector.…”

Tourism in sub-global assessments of ecosystem services

“…Hence, this analysis is important not only because it reveals another instance of knowledge production and dissemination about tourism beyond the usual channels associated with the subject (Wardle and Buckley, 2014). It also presents compelling evidence of a lack of appropriate interaction and knowledge exchange between two significant fields of study which is to their mutual loss.…”