The popularity of prestigious hospitality journals: a Google Scholar approach
The Authors
Rob Law, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China
Robert van der Veen, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Prof. Jamie Murphy for offering useful comments on this study. This research was partly supported by a grant funded by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Project Code: G-YF36).
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show that prior studies on rating hospitality journals primarily used two major assessment categories. The first category gauges experts' perceptions of a journal's quality in terms of prestige. The second category counts objective measures that reflect journal quality in terms of popularity. The purpose of this study is to introduce a new counting method that uses Google Scholar (GS) to evaluate the citation counts of the leading hospitality journals.
Design/methodology/approach – The study began with the top hospitality journals in a recent study that rated journals based on perceived quality by hospitality experts. Next the paper examined the popularity, defined as the citations in Google Scholar (GS), of these leading hospitality journals. The collection of 1960 to 2006 GS citation counts was conducted from February to August 2007.
Findings – The ranking of GS citation counts for the selected journals generally followed the perceived ratings. The International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management and Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly performed the best in average citations per year. The International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management and International Journal of Hospitality Management received the largest number of average citations per published article.
Research limitations/implications – The major limitations of this study are the mere eight hospitality journals included in the study and GS's proprietary indexing algorithm. Another limitation is the dynamic aspect of GS, which generates unequal findings over time. Still, the research findings help hospitality researchers, educators, practitioners, and students to understand the popularity of the most prestigious hospitality journals.
Originality/value – This paper is a novel attempt that uses GS for ranking popularity of the most prestigious hospitality journals.
Article Type:
Research paper
Keyword(s):
Tourism; Questionnaires.
Journal:
International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management
Volume:
20
Number:
2
Year:
2008
pp:
113-125
Copyright ©
Emerald Group Publishing Limited
ISSN:
0959-6119
Introduction
The importance of research and journal publications in hospitality and tourism is widely documented (Collison and Sheldon, 1991; Jogaratname et al., 2005; McKercher et al., 2007; Zhao and Ritchie, 2007). In general, journals serve as a storage area for intellectual work, a communication channel for readers within related disciplines, and importantly, a system for recognizing individual and institutional contributions to knowledge development. In hospitality and tourism, Law and Chon (2007) argue that, based on their 2006 global survey, publications in first-tier journals ranked first among all research related activities. Yet the authors noted a limitation of their study was no clear list of first-tier journals.
In another recent article, McKercher et al. (2006) disclosed their findings of a worldwide survey conducted at the end of 2004 on the perceived quality of 30 hospitality and 40 tourism journals. Based on perceptions of 191 hospitality and 314 tourism experts, McKercher et al.'s (2006) study seems the most comprehensive one on journal rating based on human assessment. Although they deliberately did not classify the surveyed journals – such as A, B, C grades – their findings clearly showed eight of the 30 hospitality journals received the highest composite scores of perceived rating and awareness. In other words, hospitality researchers assessed these hospitality journals as the most prestigious. These eight journals were, in descending order of composite scores: Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly (CHRAQ), International Journal of Hospitality Management (IJHM), Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research (JHTR), International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management (IJCHM), Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Education (JHTE), FIU Hospitality Review (FIUHR), Journal of Hospitality & Leisure Marketing (JHLM), and International Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Administration (IJHTA).
While expert assessment is common for evaluating journal quality (Barman et al., 1991; Reinstein and Calderon, 2006; Sheldon and Collison, 1990), some researchers argue that citation counts are equally important and more objective than expert assessment (Opthof, 1997; Schmidgall et al., 2007). Yet studies rarely, if ever, incorporate both expert assessment and citation counts into a single study.
The authors of this article argue for the importance of both methods, expert assessment and citation analysis, in journal evaluations. For instance, a top-tier research journal could be less useful than a popular journal if senior researchers rate the journal highly but it has a very small number of readers or is rarely cited. Similarly, the quality of a journal may not be good if it has a large number of readers but experienced researchers ignore or disrespect the journal. Likewise, Bollen et al. (2007) stated that judgments by human experts relate to journal prestige as findings suggest perceived quality, whereas objective counting – often the journal's citation frequency – represents the popularity of a journal to readers.
In view of the importance of ranking journals and the absence of clear dominance of judgmental assessment (prestige) over objective counting (popularity), or vice versa, this study attempts to evaluate the popularity of the most prestigious hospitality journals. To date, no published article in the hospitality literature has made such an attempt. This research should benefit readers of hospitality journals from a better understanding of the popularity of the leading journals. Additionally, academics can select the appropriate hospitality journals for disseminating their research outcomes.
Literature review
Methods to evaluate journal quality generally fall into two categories of:
- Judgment by human experts.
- Objective counting (McKercher et al., 2006; Reinstein and Calderon, 2006).
Two published articles proposed to combine both categories (Turban et al., 2004; Zhou et al., 2002) to orderly graded journals (e.g. A, B or C grades) using a fuzzy evaluation process but no empirical results were provided.
Judgmental assessment
Assessments by human experts are a common approach to rate journal quality. Using questionnaires with point-scale descriptors, human experts provide their perceived values of the selected journals, and these values should reflect journal quality (Law et al., 2005; Schmidgall and Woods, 1993). Bonner et al. (2006) as well as Zsidisin et al. (2007) showed that surveys were the common way to rate accounting journals, and purchasing and supply journals. In hospitality and tourism, examples of judgmental journal rating include worldwide academics (McKercher et al., 2006; Pechlaner et al., 2004; Soteriou et al., 1999), members of a professional body (Schmidgall et al., 1996), directors of university programs (Ferreira et al., 1998), conference participants (Hsu and Yeung, 2003), and industry practitioners (Kay, 2001).
A subjective judgmental assessment allows experts to evaluate journal quality based on their knowledge and experience. A primary reason for conducting a judgmental assessment is the collective agreement on journal quality, and hence the prestige. The associated limitations of this approach are the small sample size, human bias due to personal relationships with specific journals, and spurious descriptors in the point-scale. Another limitation of this approach is the frequently used single value for perceived rating. In their recent global survey, McKercher et al. (2006) derived a composite score, based on awareness and quality, for judgmental rating of journals. The composite score, however, penalized specialized journals and rewarded generic journals as specialized journals have a lower level of awareness as compared to generic journals.
Objective counting
Objective counting methods mainly consist of citation index, impact factor, electronic downloads, and at times acceptance rate. A citation index refers to the number of times a published article was cited in a specific time period (Bollen et al., 2007; Linton and Thongpapanl, 2004; Vastag and Montabon, 2002). As a rule, higher quality articles, and thus journals, are cited more frequently than those of lower quality (Schmidgall et al. 2007; Reinstein and Calderon, 2006). Similar to citation index, the impact factor of a journal is the ratio of the number of times that the published articles in a journal were cited to the total number of citable articles (DuBois and Reeb, 2000; Zinkhan and Leigh, 1999).
The widely used Thomson Scientific ISI Impact Factor defines the status, or quality, of a journal for a specific year as the ratio of two numbers (Bollen et al., 2007; Garfield, 1972). The denominator is the total number of citable articles published in the journal in the past two years; the nominator is the total number of citations in the year to any articles published in this journal during the past two years. Although the ISI Impact Factor is widely used in the international academic community as a proxy for journal quality, only two tourism journals are in the ISI database (McKercher, 2005). The Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly is the only ISI included hospitality journal, added to the list in 2007 (Hotel New Resource, 2007).
Owing to the fact that only three hospitality and tourism journals are in ISI's database, ISI Impact Factors are virtually useless for measuring some 30 hospitality journals and 40 tourism journals. In brief, citation index and impact factor both assume the quality of a published article or journal directly relates to its citation frequency. This assumption, however, disadvantages specialized journals with much less citations than mainstream journals. Furthermore, King (2004) criticized that a high citation frequency could be due to self-citation or poor articles that many scholars disparage. In summary, impact factors stem from techniques that may not reflect the true quality of a journal and its articles, particularly in the hospitality and tourism disciplines.
In recent articles, researchers have suggested using Google Scholar (GS) as an alternative for citation counts (Helms-Park et al., 2007; Walters, 2007). Released in beta version in 2004, the free GS (scholar.google.com) indexes more scholarly articles, books, and theses than any existing database. GS basically covers all websites, which its search engine can find from publishers, preprint repositories, and scholarly organizations, and in various languages such as English, Chinese, and Spanish (Noruzi, 2005; Walters, 2007). In hospitality and tourism, Jamal et al. (2007) and Hall (2007) stated the advantages of using GS for citation analysis, but they provided neither empirical findings nor suggestions on how to conduct the analysis.
As previously stated, the frequency of downloading an article from an electronic source can reflect the popularity or quality of an article or the journal (Ryan, 2005). This method, however, has methodological flaws. Other than limited access by a small group of subscribers, an automated process can download a publication for virtually an unlimited number of times.
Another proxy for journal quality is the acceptance rate, as this figure generally shows how difficult it is to publish in a journal. This figure is, however, often kept by the editor for internal use. Moreover, this figure is easy to manipulate by enlarging the denominator to include all types of submissions whereas the nominator only includes accepted full-length articles (McKercher et al., 2006).
To summarize, the limitations of existing methods to rate journal quality strongly hint the necessity and importance for further development of new approaches. In response to this ongoing need, this study uses GS – a search engine expressly for academic publications – to evaluate the citation rate of the top eight hospitality journals in a recent global survey of hospitality experts (McKercher et al., 2006). Thus by using GS, this study applies a quantitative technique to results based on human assessment.
Methodology
To recap, the primary objective of this study is to evaluate the popularity, which is operationalized as the average annual GS citations and the GS citations per published article in the eight most prestigious hospitality journals noted earlier. Some journals have changed their names, but considering the consistency of citation counts, only the names at the end of 2006 are in the analysis.
Data collection was conducted from February to August 2007 for articles in the eight leading journals, from their initial years of publishing articles to 2006. Following the useful GS search hints (scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/librarylinks.html) and Noruzi (2005), articles in the eight hospitality journals were searched using GS. Figure 1 shows the screen shot of GS. For example, using the restrictive double quote operator, or “quotation marks”, for each journal in the publication field in the advanced GS search function (scholar.google.com/advanced_scholar_search?hl=en&lr=lang_en) helped avoid duplication of journal names. Similarly, using both “and” and “&”, when “&” appears in the journal name helped ensure including articles cited in that journal.
Although the GS advanced search function displays total number of results, it lists only the first 1,000 results. This study thus searched in each year in the date function. In addition, searching in each year enabled the study to get data in a historical perspective. When an article was cited by another published article within GS, a link to the latter appears below the primary source. This, in turn, allows researchers to search for the contexts in which the article was cited. The number of citations, listed as “cited by” for each journal article, was then counted. This process was continuously performed for all listed articles thus yielded the total citations for the articles in a specific journal in a designated year.
The annual number of articles published in each journal and the journal's starting year came from EBSCOHost's Hospitality and Tourism Complete database (web.ebscohost.com/ ehost/search?vid=2&hid=5&sid=6912cad9-7882-442e-ab93-33abc2fba614%40SRCSM2), SAGE (www.sagepub.com) and ScienceDirect (www.sciencedirect.com). With the total number of citations as obtained from GS, the average annual citations, together with the average annual citations per published article and thus the overall average citations per published article, were then numerical derived.
Unlike the ISI impact factor, which is limited to journals in Thomson Scientific's database, GS virtually has no limit on the sources of including the citation sources. These sources can appear in many formats such as journals, books, and conference proceedings, and in many languages. The next section presents findings of the GS citation analyses for the leading hospitality journals.
Findings and discussions
CHRAQ and IJHTA have the longest and shortest historical records of publishing articles respectively. Except for CHRAQ and JHTR, all journals published a steady and stable number of articles each year. Since its launch in 1960, CHRAQ published about 100 articles annually until the mid-1980s. After that, the number of CHRAQ articles increased rapidly to almost 350 per year in the mid-1990s. The number of articles in CHRAQ, however, dropped at the end of the 1990s. Examining CHRAQ for the large changes in number of articles showed the inclusion, and subsequent exclusion, of many short industry-oriented or press release related articles.
Similarly, the collections of conference articles in JHTR in the late-1980s and early-1990s produced more than 170 articles in the late-1980s and early-1990s. Although the short industry-oriented articles in CHRAQ and the conference articles in JHTR were not peer-reviewed journal articles, which often require multiple rounds of revisions before acceptance for publications, these industry-oriented and conference articles are, arguably, citable in the usual way as peer-reviewed journal articles. They were thus included in the citation analysis. The number of published articles in the journals, and thus their citation rates, directly influence the popularity measures in this study. Figures 2 and 3 present the annual GS citation analysis of the eight leading hospitality journals since the journals' launch.
While Figure 2 shows the annual citations of the eight journals, Figure 3 displays the annual citations per published article. According to the findings, the annual citations in journals ranged from zero (e.g. FIUHR in 1988) to a maximum of 414 (CHRAQ in 2001) (Figure 2), and the citations per published article varied from zero (e.g. FIUHR in 1988) to 9.65 (IJHM in 1999) (Figure 3). CHRAQ had low citations from 1960 to 1980, perhaps due to the “industry-oriented” nature of the early articles. Another reason for this observation could be the infancy of hospitality research then. In addition, most journals received few citations in 2005 and 2006 as it takes time for articles to work their way into the research stream. Other than in 2005 and 2006, IJCHM was the only journal that received consistently high citation counts over the years. In contrast, FIUHR and JHTE had consistently low citation counts in both measures during the entire period.
Table I summarizes the GS citation analysis of the eight journals, together with their first years of publishing articles. All but one leading hospitality journals had a short history of published articles. Other than CHRAQ, which began in 1960, the journals have been in existence for seven to 25 years. On average, these journals published 18 to 129 articles per year and had a wide range of citation counts. To demonstrate, the average citations per published article ranged from 0.4 to 3.14, and the average annual citations varied from eight to 167. Both these measures are of use to readers as the average citations per published article indicate the popularity of each journal article, whereas average annual citations can serve as a proxy of the journal's popularity. The length of time that a journal has been in print does not seem to have any relationship with its popularity measures. According to the findings in Table I, IJCHM ranked first in terms of both citation measurements. The “penalty” of the low citation counts for CHRAQ's articles in the pre-1980 era is acknowledged in this study. Future efforts can be devoted to perform citation analysis for the previous “n” years instead of counting for the entire period.
Table II presents the rankings of leading hospitality journals, both in GS citation analysis and judgmental assessment (McKercher et al., 2006). As Table II reveals, IJCHM, which ranked Number 4 in McKercher et al.'s (2006) study, outperformed other journals in both citation measures. CHRAQ, IJHM, and JHTR, the best three journals in McKercher et al.'s (2006) study, ranked second, third, and fourth in average citations per year. These three journals, however, ranked sixth, second, and third when average citations per publication is used as the measurement. The other four journals, JHLM, IJHTA, HJTE, and FIUHR, were generally at lower positions in both citation analysis and judgmental assessment.
Opthof (1997) stated that citation analysis might disagree with peer judgment. Findings of this study, however, showed a close relationship between subjective assessment and citation counts. On the basis of annual average citations, all but one journal followed McKercher et al.'s (2006) findings within two rungs. IJCHM, which was ranked Number 4 by human experts, ranked Number 1 in this study. Considering average citations per publication, with the exception of CHRAQ, all journals' ranks followed McKercher et al. (2006) within three rungs. IJCHM, again, showed superiority in popularity of individual articles. In other words, findings of this study correspond to Jamal et al.'s (2008) statement of a correlation between quantitative and quality methods of journal quality assessment.
Implications and conclusions
As an initial and novel attempt to use GS for measuring the popularity of leading hospitality journals, this study makes several contributions to hospitality research. First, this study provides a much wider coverage of citation counts than the Thomson Scientific ISI, particularly as only one hospitality journals is in ISI's database. GS uses a proprietary algorithm to identify journal articles, preprints, books, dissertations, technical reports, and other scholarly publications. After all, the database one uses influences journal and article citation counts. Among the eight databases in his research, Walters (2007) found GS indexed the greatest number of articles and provided the most uniform coverage of publishers and dates. As such, findings of this study should provide a more comprehensive citation overview of the eight leading hospitality journals.
Additionally, findings of this study also included articles authored by policy makers, industry practitioners, academic researchers, educators, and postgraduate students in many languages. Compared to expert assessment, this wider coverage surely offers a more realistic indication of readership and popularity.
With careful interpretations, findings of this research would interest both industry and academics. To illustrate, hospitality industry practitioners may find this study useful in identifying researchers who could work on the topics of interest to their businesses or to influence others in the industry. Academic researchers may find the findings useful as the citation counts provide measurable evidence of popularity for a leading journal and its published articles. University administrators can use the findings as a measurable source to evaluate the performance of staff members. Lastly, educators and post-graduate students can determine which popular and prestigious hospitality journals they should read and target for their research.
While the approach of this study is unique, its actual use rests with individuals. Although this study, based in GS citations, shows the general popularity of the prestigious hospitality journals, the research implications, industry implications, innovativeness, and readability as compared to other journals still remain largely unknown. As the hospitality industry is application-oriented, it would be desirable to determine the actual impact of these journals on industry. Additionally, universities or research institutes can consider using GS as an alternative for evaluating journal quality instead of a replacement of the existing evaluation techniques.
The major limitations of this study relate to the proprietary algorithm of GS. In other words, how GS carries out the actual search is unknown to the general public. Also, some duplication cases were noticed during the data collection process. Despite the efforts to remove duplications, it is possible that a couple of duplications may be incorporated into the counting. In addition, editorial policy, target audience, online access to a journal, and publisher's promotion may all have implications on the number of citations received. Another limitation is that GS updates its database once every few weeks, leading to slightly different citation counts between months. Given the length of time coverage conducted in this research and taking average citation counts, findings of this research should provide a good indication of the journals' popularity. Still, this study should be conducted in a longitudinal way to show the changes of citations.
Two natural extensions of this study are to include more hospitality journals and to compare the citation counts with journals in other disciplines. Also, it would be desirable to examine the quality of citations for the types of articles that were cited and the citation sources. Another future research possibility is to develop a system that incorporate both subjective assessment and objective counting into the overall evaluation system, which in turn, returns an overall amalgamated rating with multiple criteria for a journal. Such an attempt, however, requires a non-trivial amount of resources that goes far beyond the discussion scope of this paper.
Figure 1Screen shot of Google Scholar
Figure 2Annual number of citations from 1960 to 2006
Figure 3Number of citations per published article from 1960 to 2006
Table IGoogle Scholar ranking of hospitality journals
Table IIComparison of ratings between Google Scholar and Peer Review
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Corresponding author
Rob Law can be contacted at: hmroblaw@polyu.edu.hk