Abstract
Research into tourism phenomena is regarded as a multidisciplinary quest, but to date no work has endeavored to quantify or characterize the extent to which various scholarly disciplines and research fields inform our scholarly discourse. The purpose of this analysis was to assess the multidisciplinary character of tourism research between 1980 and 2010. Previous efforts to analyze the use of the literature from other disciplines have been significantly limited. In this study, we sought to address this need by analyzing a sample comprising nearly 3,000 citations from tourism research articles published in a range of tourism journals stratified by journal ranking and time period.
Keywords
Introduction
It is impossible to say when the scientific study of tourism first began. But as a global industry, it is clear that the embryonic origins of modern tourism began in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. In 1946, the first journal serving the scientific needs of researchers of tourism phenomena published its first issue out of Switzerland, titled Revue de Tourisme/The Tourist’s Review/Zeitschrift für Fremdenverkehr. Over the next 34 years, the scientific study of tourism gradually evolved as a scholarly field, creating a small but growing body of literature. Between 1946 and 1980, three further scholarly journals emerged. In 1961, the Western Council for Travel Research Bulletin began publication. In 1970, this became the Travel Research Bulletin (after the merging of the Western and Eastern Councils for Travel Research into TTRA, the Travel and Tourism Research Association) and subsequently, in January 1972, the Journal of Travel Research. In November 1973, Annals of Tourism Research began publication followed by Tourism Management in 1980. These latter three journals have established themselves among the leading international scientific journals for the reporting of scholarly tourism research.
Since 1980, the scientific study of tourism and its scholarly publication has flourished. Many additional tourism research journals have been added (McKercher, Law and Lamb 2006). The breadth and depth of analysis has expanded and strengthened. Numerous tourism academic associations have been established and tourism research conferences abound. The multidisciplinary profile of tourism research has also broadened. Whereas early journal articles cited a limited number of references with few from tourism journals per se, today’s tourism articles cite far more papers both from the tourism research literature and from a much larger range of cognate disciplines. As the formal publication of tourism research approaches 70 years of history, it is timely to explore how the multidisciplinary character of tourism research has evolved.
With the goal of better understanding the evolution of tourism research, the purpose of this analysis, therefore, was to investigate trends in the use and frequency of theories and ideas from other disciplines and research fields. Additionally, we examine changes in the foundations of our research as reflected by the distribution of theories and ideas from the tourism literature as contrasted with other disciplines and fields. Specifically, we wished to answer two key questions:
What are the temporal trends in the multidisciplinary character of tourism research?
How has the influence of other disciplines and fields of research evolved and helped shape the character of tourism research?
Tourism Scholarship and Publication
Particularly over the past decade, numerous research efforts have examined the progress and evolution of tourism research and scholarship. Numerous studies have analyzed and reported on various aspects of tourism research. Overall, these studies fall into one or more of six types, namely, assessments of research citations, tourism research journals, research disciplines, research quality, institutional research output, and authorship. Table 1 identifies many of these studies classified according to their subject focus.
Past Studies of Tourism Research Scholarship.
Citation source, frequency, self-citation behavior, and citation statistics.
Evolution, development, impact, and significance of the various journals.
Disciplinary and multidisciplinary nature of tourism research and publications.
Quality assessment of tourism research and journal rankings or ratings.
Research productivity and standing of the various universities and research institutions.
Research productivity and quality of individual research scholars.
Given our focus on the evolution and maturation of the multidisciplinary character of tourism research, we were not particularly interested per se in the productivity and contributions of particular authors or academic institutions. Rather, our goal was to investigate how various scientific disciplines have contributed to tourism research over the years. To accomplish this goal, we examined the sources of literature cited by tourism researchers, and the fields of research associated with those sources. Therefore, in addition to our principal interest in the disciplines that inform tourism research, we are also intrinsically interested in citations, journals, and quality.
The Multidisciplinary Character of Tourism Research
To our knowledge, Leiper (1981) and Jafari and Ritchie (1981) were the first to publish on the multidisciplinary character of tourism scholarship. Whereas Leiper called for the scholarship of tourism to be developed as a distinct discipline, Jafari and Ritchie examined the multidisciplinary character of tourism research, identifying five disciplines (economics, sociology, psychology, geography, and anthropology) “as the basis for tourism studies” (p. 22) but noted that these provide only a partial listing of useful sources of concepts, theories, and ideas. In addition, they also noted that these more specialized areas of study included archaeology, religion, language, history, and political science, as well as professional fields of study, including law, architecture, management, “recreology,” and communications. Jafari and Ritchie (1981) illustrated their view of this disciplinary character of tourism as shown in Figure 1.
Study of Tourism – Choice of Discipline and Approach
Some years later, Jafari and Aaser (1988) analyzed the disciplinary profile of tourism doctoral dissertations produced up to that point in time and found that, of 157 dissertations, a little more than 70% studied tourism issues from one of four main disciplines (i.e., economics, anthropology, geography, and recreation). Another five disciplines (business administration, education, sociology, urban-regional planning, and political science) produced multiple dissertations, and individual dissertations were produced out of six further disciplines, including fine arts, social work, theology, history, mass communication, and public relations.
In a survey of publishing faculty, Sheldon (1991), in part, gathered information on two different aspects of the disciplinary publishing behavior of tourism and hospitality researchers. They were asked in which journals/disciplines in allied fields they referenced the most and published the most. The sample of 103 faculty mentioned a total of 131 journals. Sheldon found that hospitality faculty mentioned only business and marketing journals but tourism faculty had, in addition, stronger connections with the fields of geography, economics, psychology, and anthropology.
In 1991, a special issue of the Annals of Tourism Research (volume 18, issue 1) published a number of papers focusing on the state of tourism research as seen from the perspective of 10 relevant disciplines. These papers covered anthropology (Nash and Smith 1991), ecology (Farrell and Runyan 1991), economics (Eadington and Redman 1991), geography (Mitchell and Murphy 1991), history (Towner and Wall 1991), leisure and recreation (Smith and Godbey 1991), marketing management (Calantone and Mazanec 1991), political science (Matthews and Richter 1991), psychology (Pearce and Stringer 1991), and sociology (Dann and Cohen 1991).
Przeclawski (1993) examined the multidisciplinary nature of tourism research and noted the importance of fields as diverse as psychology, pedagogics, sociology, anthropology, economics, marketing, law, geography, architecture, physical planning, history, philosophy, ecology, political science, biology, and medicine.
Echtner and Jamal (1997) discussed the “disciplinary dilemma” of tourism studies by focusing on the debate concerning the best way to move tourism research forward so that cognate disciplines contribute to an understanding of the tourism phenomenon without resulting in fragmentation of tourism knowledge and theory. They contended that “interdisciplinary isolation creates barriers for the development of a more holistic understanding of tourism” (p. 871). It may be argued, however, that the isolation of tourism research from these other disciplines may have in turn obstructed the transfer and application of state-of-the-art developments in theory and method derived from within these other disciplines.
Howey et al. (1999) reported on an analysis of cross-citations among research communities/disciplines. They found that almost 80% of the literature cited in tourism and hospitality research derived from other disciplines based on their analysis of three years of research published in a small number of selected journals. They question whether this is an indication that tourism and hospitality researchers are too reliant on research from other disciplines and need to rely more on their own body of literature.
Based on an analysis of the 100 most frequently cited articles published in tourism journals from 2000 to 2007, Law et al. (2009), were able to group these articles into ten topic categories. The most popular topics were psychology and tourist behavior, destination image and marketing, tourism organization and management, and heritage and environmental issues. Other categories included the economics of tourism, theory and research development, tourism technology and trends, sociology and culture issues, rural tourism, hospitality topics, tourism product development and planning, and host–guest relationships. These categories, however, align only broadly with particular disciplines. The authors recommended the extension of this type of research across a broader time period to enable the analysis of trends.
The most recent paper to evaluate the disciplinary profile of tourism research was conducted by Cheng et al. (2011). They concluded that, prior to 1970, published tourism research spanned 17 disciplines, growing to 26 disciplines for tourism research published after 1991. To identify disciplines, however, the authors relied on an examination of the mission statements of the 59 tourism journals chosen for their study rather than on an assessment of the disciplinary focus of individual articles published in those journals. The disciplinary scope of journals may not provide a reliable indication of the disciplinary scope and content of articles published in those journals and provides no information on the frequency of disciplinary focus.
In summary, there have been a number of introspective efforts to assess the disciplinary foundations and character of tourism research. The existing studies have, however, been either descriptive and/or prescriptive, or have been significantly limited in the data gathered as the basis for analyzing the disciplinary basis of tourism research; moreover, most of these previous studies have examined only the research published in select, highly ranked journals. There is a significant lack of reliable, comprehensive data that informs the disciplinary foundations and character of tourism research published in scholarly journals during the past 40 years. To overcome these limitations, this research objectively assesses the disciplinary bases of articles published in a sample of tourism journals by examining the disciplinary origin of the various articles cited in each paper. It is contended that this approach provides much more reliable information as compared to a subjective assessment of the journal or article titles.
Research Design
The initial research step was to select a representative sample of tourism research published over the past 40 years. To accomplish this step, a stratified sampling method was used, first, to choose a set of tourism journals published in 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. To achieve this, we identified a sampling frame of tourism research journals. As the study was concerned with tourism research rather than hospitality, recreation, or leisure research, we wished to focus only on journals that emphasized tourism research exclusively or to a significant extent. For this purpose, we used a database of almost 22,000 scholarly journals prepared by the Australian Research Council 1 (ARC) for the 2010 quality assessment of scholarly research known as Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), which classifies journals by discipline/field of research.
Under this classification system, the field of tourism research has its own classification code (code 1506), containing 52 journals. Table 2 identifies these 52 tourism-classified journals with details of their quality rank within this database. Journals in the database were ranked into four quality classes. A few elite journals in a research field were designated with the label A*. Other high-quality journals were assigned to an A-labeled group of journals. The remaining assessed mid-range and lower-quality journals were labeled B and C respectively.
Tourism-Classified Journals in the Australian Research Council Database.
As the purpose of this study was to identify a suitable set of tourism research journals from which journal articles could be sampled for analysis, we required journals which were representative of tourism research published over time as well as by quality ranking. As journal ranking tends to be associated with journal age, it was not possible to create a journal set that contained all combinations of journal age and quality. For example, the tourism research code contains only three A*-ranked journals, all of which began publication before 1990. However, we chose a stratified sample of 15 journals covering both time period and quality ranking that achieved this goal as far as was possible. Other considerations that influenced our chosen set of tourism research journals included the availability of articles online and publication in English.
Having selected the journals we next used a systematic random sampling method to select a sample of articles from each journal. In order to enable analysis of changes occurring over time, as there were too few journals and too few articles published in 1970, we chose to sample articles from these journals published in the years 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010. Specifically, for each of the study journals, our sample of articles was obtained by selecting every 10th paper published in 2000 and 2010. Because of the lower total number of articles published in 1980 and 1990, we sampled every fifth paper. This increased sampling rate ensured a sufficient number of articles in our sample for those years to provide a sufficiently representative sample. Table 3 summarizes the sample of tourism research journals and the final sample of articles we worked with for the purposes of our analysis.
Articles Sampled by Journal and Year.
Having chosen the sample of 152 tourism research articles published in the 15 journals over the four time periods a decade apart, the next task was to gather appropriate data from each article. In addition to the journal name and publication year, the principal items of data extracted for each article included the article title; the names of each author; the affiliations of each author; where an abstract was provided, the full abstract; where a set of keywords were provided, all keywords; the total number of references cited divided into journal and nonjournal reference types (i.e., books, reports, theses, etc.); and for each reference to an article published in a journal, the names of all authors, the year the cited reference was published, the title of the cited article, the name of the journal which published that article, and an indicator of whether that cited article included an author from that particular paper (i.e., an author self-reference).
In addition to these data extracted from each article, further information was added to the data set as follows. At this point we had, for each of the sampled articles, the titles of all journals associated with each cited journal article listed as a reference. By using the ARC database of more than 22,000 journals described above, we were then able to add details for each cited journal providing information on the journal’s quality rank as well as “field of research” codes. Each journal in this database contained up to three field-of-research (FoR) codes. All journals in the database were assigned at least one code (FoR1). However, where a journal sufficiently crossed over into additional fields of research, one or two further codes (i.e., FoR2 and FoR3) had been assigned. In cases where a journal was best regarded as being multidisciplinary (i.e., four or more FoR codes) the label “MD” had been assigned to the FoR1 code in these instances. By extracting this additional information from this journal database into our sampled information, we were then able to objectively analyze the multidisciplinary profile of all 152 sampled articles, including the data on journal quality ranking and citation frequencies.
It is helpful to describe the nature of these FoR codes further. This coding system consists of a hierarchy of three code levels. Two-digit codes identify broad disciplinary fields. For example, code 01 distinguishes the field of Mathematical Sciences, 02 identifies the Physical Sciences, and 03 Chemical Sciences, etc. In total there are 22 FoR codes at the two-digit level. One of these two-digit codes (i.e., 15 Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services) provides for the Tourism field of research. Within each two-digit code, there are then a number of four-digit coded categories. For example, the two-digit code 20 representing Language, Communication and Culture includes six four-digit codes covering the subfields of Communication and Media Studies (2001), Cultural Studies (2002), Language Studies (2003), Linguistics (2004), Literary Studies (2005), and Other Language, Communication and Culture not elsewhere classified (2099). The third level in the FoR code hierarchy contained six-digit codes. For example, the four-digit code representing the Tourism field of research (1506) was further divided into seven further six-digit codes covering Impacts of Tourism (150601), Tourism Forecasting (150602), Tourism Management (150603), etc. The ARC journal database assigned FoR codes to journals down to the four-digit level only. Hence, for the purpose of our analysis, we made no use of these six-digit FoR codes.
By the time this further task was completed, the 152 sampled articles had provided a total of 2,802 journal article citations ranging from no cited articles for a small number of the sampled papers up to as many as 78 journal article citations. The average for the whole sample was 18.4 journal article citations per paper, but this varied significantly particularly with respect to the time period (3.2 average journal article citations in 1980 to 30.9 journal citations in articles published in the year 2010). Having produced a data set of nearly 3,000 journal article citations stratified by citation year and journal rank, the following analyses and results allow us to draw reliable conclusions about the evolution and maturation of tourism research with regard to its disciplinary foundations and citation history.
The Disciplinary Foundations of Tourism Research: Findings and Discussion
Profile and Evolution of Tourism Research Citation Behavior
On average, across the full set of data, each article cited 36.0 references (range 0 to 112) consisting of 18.4 citations to journal articles (range 0 to 78) and 17.4 citations to nonjournal references (range 0 to 67). Table 4 shows how the number and percentage of journal and nonjournal cited references have evolved over time. Although nonjournal citations increased by 227% between 1980 and 2010, journal citations rose by almost a factor of 10. The percentage of journal citations correspondingly increased from 26.8% to 60.3%. Clearly, tourism researchers have over time increased their use of previous research and have turned to refereed journal articles as their principal source of that research. This result was to be expected given the expanding body of published research in general, and tourism research in particular, over the past four or five decades. Additionally, the evolution of electronic literature search engines, which tend to focus on journal articles, has likely impacted literature review processes. However, this type of growth is unlikely to continue. Researchers and journal editors will inevitably apply reasonable limits to the length of the list of references appearing at the end of each article. It is also becoming common practice to cite review articles that, to some extent, perform some of the task of reviewing the literature without the need to exhaustively account for the relevant literature.
Number of Cited Journal Publications.
Interestingly, there was an average of only 1.19 self-references per article (range 0 to 12). This result may imply that tourism researchers are not overly prone to excess referencing of their own work. However, it seems unlikely that an author would fail to cite and reference his or her own previous research on the topic if it were relevant. Therefore, alternatively, this might also indicate that tourism researchers show a low propensity to build on their expertise as reported in previously published research. Are tourism researchers too ready to flit from topic to topic rather than building greater expertise in one or a few important tourism research themes? These data may also possibly be affected by the fact that young tourism researchers have had little time to build their tourism expertise, or because other researchers, whose principal research interest lies outside tourism, have on this occasion, given the study context, chosen to publish in a tourism journal. If this result is indicative of a weakness to build expertise, this may be a cause for concern. Further research would be needed to examine this question in more detail.
Table 5 summarizes the average age of cited journal research. Although the volume of references cited per article has grown considerably between 1980 and 2010, the average age of the references, at the time of publication, has increased only marginally over the same time period from 8.0 to 10.8 years, respectively. This is probably indicative of the fact that the rapid growth of more recently published research would have the effect of keeping the average age down. Additionally, the use of review articles, as noted above, would contribute to this effect as well. Authors do tend to be somewhat reluctant to use older articles in their review of the literature. However, this does not always occur as a result of research becoming out of date. There is a tendency for authors to make use of older published research via reference to more recent articles which have cited the earlier research. Consequently, the age of cited research is probably likely to underrepresent the influence of significantly older research.
Age of Cited Journal Publications.
Six citations provided no year of publication typically because the article was in press.
Average weighted by the differing number of cited journal publications in each year.
The use of citations was also analyzed by journal predominance and journal ranking. Predominance was assessed by identifying which were the most frequently cited journals. We analyzed the data covering the full time period as well as by decade in order to examine how the use of particular journals has changed over time. These results are summarized in Table 6, which lists the 10 most frequently cited journals in each period. Although this information is derived from a sample, and is therefore an estimate, it does serve to illustrate the general changes that have occurred. Looking at the full period, as one would expect, the citations are dominated by reference to articles published in Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management, and the Journal of Travel Research. The number of citations to these three journals exceeds by far the next most frequently cited journal. Seven of the top 10 journals overall focus on tourism research (if one also includes the Journal of Leisure Research in this group). Interestingly the other three most cited journals are the leading journals in marketing and consumer behavior.
Most Frequently Cited Journals a .
Indicates the number of citations to each journal.
When one looks, however, at how the picture varies by time period, it is evident that the dominant role of the top three tourism research journals really emerged from the 1990s. Of course, it is to be expected that in the earlier years of tourism research, authors would draw much of their literature from other cognate disciplines. The information in this table does raise a number of interesting questions, however, for the tourism research community. Apart from the influence of leading marketing journals, there is little evidence that major journals from other disciplines (such as management, environmental science, sociology, economics) have played very significant roles. Has tourism research made sufficient use of theories, ideas and methodologies from non-tourism fields of research? Is tourism research too “cocooned” into tourism-focused journals? Given the multidisciplinary character of tourism as a research phenomenon, is there sufficient cross-fertilization with other significant research fields/disciplines?
The profile of cited research as a function of journal ranking is illustrated in Figure 2. The distributions by journal rank do not differ markedly and uniformly confirm the dominant influence of articles published in the “top tier” journals. It is important to note that this figure is based on journal quality rankings as assessed in 2010. Journal rankings would have differed in earlier years and have continued to evolve and change. So this figure needs to be interpreted with that caveat in mind. However, it is clear that the more highly regarded journals relevant to the field of tourism research have always played a dominant role in providing the influential research basis upon which further research has been founded. It is worth emphasizing as well that A*-ranked journals in any field of research are restricted only to an elite few. In the tourism research field, only three of 52 journals had an A* designation in 2010. In other fields of research, too, A* journals are few in number. So the fact that they account for 52% of citations yet include less than 10% of journals further adds to the very high importance of research published in those particular journals.
Distributions of Cited Journal Rankings.
On this point, different interpretations are possible. Research published in A* journals is more likely to be cited assuming such research is superior and therefore of greater value as a foundation for future research. To some extent it may be the case that researchers are more likely to utilize articles published in the top tier journals because that is what is “expected” or because it is believed to lend credibility to their own research. Additionally, as the three A* tourism journals are, by necessity, well-represented in the data sample, it is to be expected that papers published in those journals would be more likely to cite other papers from the same journal, all other factors being equal. In any event, as we strategically selected a representative sample of tourism research journals to begin with, varying by perceived quality and time period, the results are nevertheless indicative of the state of cited tourism research as it stands.
Profile and Evolution of the Multidisciplinary Character of Tourism Research
In 1980, 75% of the journal citations in the tourism literature were from nontourism journals. Since then, however, the percentage of nontourism journal citations has stabilized at about 55%; specifically 55% in 1990, 59.5% in 2000, and 55.3% in 2010. Given our focus on the disciplinary foundations of our research, the following analyses focused specifically on the nontourism journal citations. The distributions of these citations across the two levels of field-of-research codes were analyzed to assess the representation of the nontourism disciplines underpinning tourism research over the past four decades. Tables 7 and 8 summarize these results at the two- and four-digit FoR levels, respectively, showing both the overall distribution of citations and how the distributions have changed over time.
Frequency of Two-Digit Fields of Research.
Frequency of Four-Digit Fields of Research (Top 50).
At the two-digit level, the most important are Studies in Human Society, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Economics. But all other FoRs are present to some lesser extent demonstrating the truly comprehensive, multidisciplinary character of research into tourism phenomena. While it can be observed that some two-digit FoRs display some upward and downward fluctuation over the time period, some of the other more marginal disciplines have gradually increased their representation and relevance over time. This suggests that either tourism researchers have increased their awareness of the relevance of some of these other disciplines or researchers from these other disciplines have gradually recognized the growing importance of tourism as a relevant field of research.
Table 8 provides a more fine-grained overview of the representation of research fields in cited research at the four-digit FoR level. The distribution of FoRs for the full sample shows that the most frequently cited research is derived from marketing (10.7%), business and management (8.0%), psychology (7.5%), commercial services (6.2%), applied economics (5.5%), sociology (5.2%), cognitive sciences (5.1%), human geography (4.5%), and urban and regional planning (3.6%) journals. Multidisciplinary journals (i.e., journals associated with more than three FoRs) also account for 4.0% of citations. Eighty-five further four-digit FoRs are also present in the data albeit at quite low frequencies, again attesting to the multidisciplinary character of tourism as a field of research.
Looking at the changes over time, a few patterns can be discerned. Although marketing and business and management have been, and still are, very frequently cited FoRs outside tourism, their relative importance has declined over time. In the early days of tourism research, a high percentage of research topics addressed marketing and business/management issues. While these are still very important fields, tourism researchers have clearly broadened their horizons. FoRs that show significant increases in their influence over time include urban and regional planning, environmental science and management, physical geography and environmental geosciences, human movement and sport science, transport and freight services, econometrics, anthropology, environmental sciences, policy and administration, political science, biological science, history and philosophy, cultural studies, fisheries science, statistics, and ecology among a number of others.
The overall picture is that tourism research is very multidisciplinary in nature and that the importance of many disciplines has grown over time as tourism research has matured. Although research from many other disciplines has been used to inform tourism research, the question should be asked whether the frequencies indicated in these tables are indicative of a healthy use of other research fields. Do tourism researchers make full and appropriate use of research from outside the tourism categorized journals? That is a difficult question to answer on the basis of these findings. On the one hand, one may conclude that the use of research from other FoR journals is at an appropriate level given the fact that journal reviewers have contented themselves with the adequacy of the papers, in this regard, accepted for publication. But as we are dealing with tourism research papers published in tourism-focused journals assessed by tourism-focused reviewers, we should ask ourselves how reviewers from the other disciplines might themselves judge the adequacy of tourism research with respect to the level of citations to key research from these other fields. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that researchers from other relevant disciplines regard tourism research as deficient in their usage of research from other cognate disciplines, particularly with regard to coverage and the progress of the latest ideas and theoretical developments. To examine this issue, a t-test was computed comparing the average age of citations to the tourism research journals as compared to the nontourism research journals. The results determined that the nontourism journal citations are significantly older (mean = 11.4 years) when compared to the tourism journal citations (9.4 years) (t = −6/4, p < .0001). Given the sample size, this is not a particularly substantive result. However, to the extent that the nontourism journals are the “parent literatures” for tourism research theories and ideas, it could be argued that the nontourism journal citations should be younger or more recent than the tourism journal citations. To the extent that the tourism literature is keeping up with the nontourism theories and ideas being adopted, the citations from that literature should certainly not be older and, arguably, should be younger.
Conclusion
We initiated this research with the goal of answering two key questions: (1) What are the temporal trends in the disciplinary foundations of tourism research? and (2) How has the influence of other disciplines and fields of research evolved and helped shape the character of tourism research? For data, we selected a random, stratified, systematic sample of articles published across the spectrum of tourism research journals in 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. We then created a database, comprising all of the citations included in the sampled articles. We merged this database with the journal ranking and disciplinary classification data provided by the Australian Research Council. Predicated on the assumption that the disciplinary foundations of an article are reflected by the articles it cites, our analyses then focused on the evolution and distribution of the citations.
Prior to discussing our findings concerning the disciplinary character of tourism research, there are four key trends to note. First, the sheer growth in the number of citations per article is impressive: the number of citations per article has grown from 12.1 in 1980 to more than 50 in 2010. Second, it is very clear that the foundation of our research has evolved to increasingly focus on research journals; journal citations have increased from 26.8% to 60.3%. Third, it is interesting to note that the average age of research journal citations has actually increased since 1980, from 8.0 to 10.8 years. When we initiated this specific analysis, we considered two possible hypotheses, the “maturity” hypothesis and the “half-life hypothesis.” The maturity hypothesis suggests that average citation age will grow over time as a field matures and there is a longer history of relevant research on a given topic. The half-life hypothesis, suggests the opposite: that with the growing body of research literature on any given topic, the “half-life” of any given article would decline with the growth in subsequent articles on the topic. The data seem to support the maturity hypothesis, implying that as researchers it is important for us to understand and appreciate the evolution of a topic or area of study over time. Fourth, the consistency in the number of research journal citations from tourism versus nontourism journals is very interesting. Although 75% of the research journal citations in 1980 were from nontourism journals, this statistic has since stabilized at about 55%. What does this say about the health of the state of tourism research from a disciplinary perspective? Some might take the view that if 55% of cited research is sourced from other cognate disciplines, this indicates that tourism researchers are making full use of relevant theories, ideas, and methods from other fields. Others might alternatively argue that since they may regard tourism not to be a discipline in itself, 45% of cited research from within tourism journals indicates instead a focus that is too inward and myopic.
Analysis of the nontourism research journal citations further confirms the diversity and multidisciplinary nature of tourism research. Of the 22 broad fields of research forming the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification system maintained by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2 and used by the Australian Research Council, our sample of citations reflected 20 fields. The only two fields not represented were Division 03 Chemical Sciences, and Division 10 Technology. Given the flourishing tourism research in recent years focused on the use of the internet, mobile technology and social media, it is perhaps surprising that Division 10 Technology is not yet represented, but one may soon expect to find the literature from various technology journals represented in our cited research. Moreover, the diversity of the use of literature and theory from other disciplines in tourism research has grown over time. Whereas early tourism research focused heavily on marketing /business /management issues, the more recent research continues this emphasis to a lesser degree and increasingly spans a broader, richer array of disciplines. Although our analysis is limited to the disciplinary foundations of tourism research, it is hard to think of another research field which is as diverse.
The really interesting conclusion of this study is actually a question. Given the diverse, multidisciplinary character of our research, how well do we assess the quality of manuscripts submitted to our journals or, for that matter, of research careers? Within the realm of the peer-reviewed journals, we depend heavily on the belief that the best judges of manuscript substance and contribution are the journal editors and referees who evaluate and assess submitted manuscripts. Across virtually all research journals, reviewers are asked to assess manuscripts against the key criterion of theoretical contribution, which presumes an adequate and appropriate review and use of the existing literature; as our results clearly reflect, this means both tourism and nontourism literature. This further assumes, of course, that editors and referees themselves are sufficiently aware and abreast of developments in theory and methodology across the disciplines relevant to the manuscripts they are being asked to judge. And this is perhaps where the greatest challenge lies. Given the extreme multidisciplinary diversity of tourism research, how able are researchers, editors, and referees to develop sufficient expertise across such multiple fields? Referees often are asked to judge manuscripts on topics that do not fall fully (or even at all?) within their specific area of expertise. Editors, at times, find it very difficult to identify and recruit referees ideally suited to judge certain types of manuscripts. Under these circumstances, can we really be confident that best use is being made of the most up-to-date research from other disciplines? While our research has looked at the history and evolution of our research, the key conclusion is the importance of multidisciplinary editorial boards and referee panels to the future growth and development of our field. Further research may well look at the evolution of journal editorial boards and the selection of review panels, particularly given the growth in the number of journals, the number of manuscript submissions, and by combination the exponential growth in the challenge of reviewing quality and contribution in this increasingly diverse, multidisciplinary field.
Given the rigorous, empirical approach followed in this study, we believe that the results are the first to truly measure the evolution of the multidisciplinary character of tourism research. Previous similar papers have been predominantly descriptive and conceptual, and have lacked a thorough measurement of the real use of literature from the full spectrum of potentially relevant scholarly disciplines. As such, we believe that these results, using comprehensive bibliographic information and a rigorous means of categorizing the links between journals and disciplines, provide a reliable, sound basis for understanding the disciplinary foundations of tourism research. In the above discussion of our findings, several further questions have arisen that represent worthwhile future research. Additional research to explore the possible answers to these questions, using bibliographic or other methods, would also add substantially to our knowledge and understanding of the foundations of tourism research.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.