Asian academic research in tourism with an international impact: A bibliometric analysis of the main academic contributions

Abstract

Asian academic research in tourism is a very recent field of research, which has significantly developed over the last decade due to the strong expansion of the tourism industry worldwide, and also owing to the strong evolution of search engines via the Internet. This article analyses the main contributions to Asian academic research in tourism over recent years using bibliometric indicators. The results obtained are based on the information contained in the Web of Science database. These results focus on explaining three fundamental questions. Firstly, we study the publication structure of Asian articles in tourism over recent decades, as well as the citations these articles have received. Secondly, we present a ranking of the most important tourism journals in Asia through the use of a series of indicators such as the number of publications in said journals, the number of citations, and the h-index. Finally, we present a list of the 50 most cited Asian articles in tourism (and hence the ones that can be considered the most influential) of all times. The results show how, in Asian terms, the most influential journals in this field are Tourism Management (TM), the Annals of Tourism Research (ATR) and the International Journal of Hospitality Management (IJHM).