Table 1.
Identification of subject areas in tourism research.
Fig 1.
Distribution of collected abstracts in the Annals of Tourism Research (ATR), Journal of Travel Research (JTR), and Tourism Management (TM) over time (article/annum).
Note that the reduced number of article in 2009 is not a data collection artifact: compare Tourism Management volume 28 (2007, 1592 pages), volume 30 (2009, 936 pages) and 32 (2011, 1496 pages). The solid line represents the total number of journal papers in Scopus database with and without the abstracts.
Table 2.
Fourteen topical clusters extracted from the abstracts of three main academic journals on tourism, 1974–2017.
Each topic is represented by multiple terms; only the first ten words with the highest weights are included. Note that the original terms were represented by word roots; the terms were converted to representative nouns and adjectives to improve readability.
Fig 2.
The change in distribution of publication topics over time (5-year running mean).
Fig 3.
Comparative distribution of subject areas (percentage) over the entire time period of 1972–2017 in Annals of Tourism Research (ATR), Journal of Travel Research (JTR) and Tourism Management (TM).
The areas are numbered as follows: 1: Tourism as a social phenomenon; 2: Image and risk; 3: Attractions; 4: Tourism industry; 5: Service quality and satisfaction; 6: Modeling and forecasting; 7: Conferences; 8: Tourist experience and motivation; 9: Market segmentation; 10: Decision making process; 11: Tourism demand; 12: Governing tourism development; 13: Sustainable tourism; 14: Local communities.
Table 3.
Percentage of papers in specific subject areas: Time period and journal.
Fig 4.
Relative number of publications per country.
Publication country is defined from the affiliation of the first author. The countries shown have at least 1% of the total number of publications or at least 3% of publications in any 5-yeat period. To smooth over temporal variability, the figure shows 5-year running mean.
Table 4.
First author’s country of affiliation.
Fig 5.
Temporal change in geography of tourism research published in ATR, JTR, and TM by first author’s affiliation.
The color scale indicates percentage of papers coming from a specific country; papers with unknown authors’ affiliation are not taken into account. Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao are presented separately, following Scopus database format.
Fig 6.
Percentage of male authors in tourism academic publications over time.
Table 5.
Gender distribution of authors in tourism scholarship.