Citations and impact of ISI tourism and hospitality journals

The paper analyses the leading international journals in Tourism and Hospitality Research using quantifiable Research Assessment Measures (RAMs), highlights the similarities and differences in alternative RAMs, shows that several RAMs capture similar performance characteristics of highly cited journals, and shows that some other RAMs have low correlations with each other, and hence add significant informational value. Several RAMs are discussed for the Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science database (hereafter ISI). Alternative RAMs may be calculated annually or updated daily to answer the questions as to When, Where and How (frequently) published papers are cited. The RAMs include the most widely used RAM, namely the classic 2-year impact factor including journal self citations (2YIF), 2-year impact factor excluding journal self citations (2YIF*), 5-year impact factor including journal self citations (5YIF), Immediacy (or zero-year impact factor (0YIF)), Eigenfactor, Article Influence, C3PO (Citation Performance Per Paper Online), h-index, PI-BETA (Papers Ignored - By Even The Authors), 2-year Self-citation Threshold Approval Ratings (2Y-STAR), Historical Self-citation Threshold Approval Ratings (H-STAR), Impact Factor Inflation (IFI), and Cited Article Influence (CAI). As data are not available for 5YIF, Article Influence and CAI for 11 of the 14 journals considered, 10 RAMs are analysed for 14 highly-cited journals in Tourism and Hospitality in the ISI category of Hospitality, Leisure, Sports and Tourism. Harmonic mean rankings of the 10 RAMs for the 14 highly-cited journals are also presented. A comparison of rankings is made for the h-index and C3PO for data from ISI and SCImago (2007) (see also SciVerse Scopus (2010)), which covers a broader range of journals, as well as a ranking of Tourism and Hospitality journals according to a subjective Aggregate Importance Rating. It is shown that emphasizing the 2-year impact factor of a journal, which partly answers the question as to When published papers are cited, to the exclusion of other informative RAMs, which answer Where and How (frequently) published papers are cited, can lead to a distorted evaluation of journal impact. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.