The language of tourism research: Social science communication through academic journals

This paper investigates tourism research communication across languages, through a census of recent journal publications from Annals, JTR, and TM in English, along with Journal of Tourism Sciences (JTS, in Korean) and Tourism Tribune (TT, in Chinese). Instances and frequencies of author appearance by language regions of published institutions are recorded for analysis. It is found that Annals, JTR and TM have about half of their authorship appearance from non-English speaking regions, making them highly international outlets for communicating tourism studies. In contrast, the dominance of authorship by a single language group is indicative of the need for, as well as the constraints of JTS and TT to become more international platforms for publishing tourism research from other language communities. Implications and limitations of the study are also reflected.