An analysis of the impact of tourism journals on Google Scholar

In spite of the increasing emphasis on the quality of publications in academia, there exists no standard list of ranked journals that is accepted by all universities and researchers. Such an absence of ranked journals is particularly true in the context of tourism, an emerging academic discipline. This study introduced a novel approach that evaluates the impact of tourism journals, which is operationalized as the average number of citations for each published article in the included tourism journals that are found by Google Scholar [GS]. Utilized the data collected from GS in three different time periods, findings showed the mostly cited journals generally matched prior studies. In particular, Tourism Management [TM] ranked first in 2009 among all included journals. In addition, the Journal of Information Technology & Tourism [JITT], which ranked fifth among all included journals, appears as the specialized journal that received the largest average citations.