What Are the Drivers of Citations?: Application in Tourism and Hospitality Journals

Abstract

<jats:p>In line with the qualitative and quantitative growth of academic papers, it is critical to understand the factors driving citations in scholarly articles. This study discovered the up-to-date academic structure in the tourism and hospitality literature and tested the comprehensive sets of factors driving citation counts using articles published in first-tier hospitality and tourism journals found on the Web of Science. To further test the effects of research topic structure on citation counts, unsupervised topic modeling was conducted with 9910 tourism and hospitality papers published in 12 journals over 10 years. Articles specific to online media and the sharing economy have received numerous citations and that recently published papers with particular research topics (e.g., rural tourism and eco-tourism) were frequently cited. This study makes a major contribution to hospitality and tourism literature by testing the effects of topic structure and topic originality discovered by text mining on citation counts.</jats:p>