Selecting the appropriate leading journal in Hospitality and Tourism research: a guide based on the topic-journal fit and the JCR impact factor

Ramón Barrera-Barrera

doi:10.1007/s11192-022-04288-8

Abstract

Selecting the appropriate academic journal is a priority issue for researchers in the process of publishing a manuscript. If researchers could quantify the research topic in terms of its fit with the journal requirements before the submission of a paper, then the assessment of journal suitability could be much easier. Basing any decision on journal impact factors alone might obviously result in a mismatch, eventual rejection and a consequent loss of time. Taking the twelve leading Tourism and Hospitality journals as a reference, the main research topics mentioned in the abstracts of 20,381 articles are identified, using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm and other text-mining techniques running the R programming language. Subsequently, a quantitative measure of the fit of the research topics in each journal is offered according to their frequency of occurrence. The results suggested that the importance of the topic-journal fit with respect to the impact factor depended on the variance of the fits among the journals. Finally, a guide of the most suitable journals for the topics is presented, based on the JCR impact factor and the fit of the topic. Some recommendations are likewise offered on the use of this methodology and its limitations.

Highlights

The scientific production of tourism papers has significantly expanded over recent years
There is a wide range of text-mining analyses—some relatively simple and others based on more complex algorithms, as previously mentioned—to perform various interrelated tasks: information retrieval, document clustering, information extraction, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and social network analysis (Kwartler, 2017)
The use of text mining analysis in the bibliometric field is gaining ground due to the new possibilities it offers. This methodology has been used to quantify the fit of the main research topics found in the abstracts of the twelve leading journals in Tourism and Hospitality

Summary

Introduction

The scientific production of tourism papers has significantly expanded over recent years. In 2005, the number of papers within this field on the Web of Science Core Collection was around 5000 articles. As of January 7, 2021, the search for the term “tourism” in this database retrieved more than 91,866 documents, of which 63,316 were articles published in over 8800 academic journals. Most of the articles were published in journals within the “Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism” category (43.22%). The others were published in journals of other categories: “Environmental Studies” (10.1%), “Management” (9.4%),. Scientometrics “Environmental Sciences” (8.6%), “Geography” (6.3%), “Economics” (5.5%), “Sociology” (5.0%), “Business” (4.2%), “Green Sustainable Science Technology” (4.8%), and “Ecology” (2.4%). These results reflect the interdisciplinarity of tourism research (OviedoGarcía, 2016)

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Conclusion