International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management

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.