Tourism citations in other disciplines

(2013). Initially there were few researchers or journals, and ideas and information were largely imported from other disciplines. This has continued, but as tourism research expanded, it also became increasingly self-referential. Here we examine whether it has entered a third phase, with outward citations in other academic disciplines: a key criterion for a mature field of study. For comparison, economics research examines how humans allocate resources, and is cited across many other disciplines. Tourism research examines how humans move around, which a priori seems equally fundamental. Here, therefore, we test how widely tourism research is cited in non-tourism journals. All searches were conducted during 2012 and 2013. We used a rationally efficient search strategy to answer this question robustly and reliably. It might theoretically be possible to search the world’s entire electronic literature for all citations of all articles in all tourism journals, but this would be very inefficient. Our strategy involved two steps. The first step used an iterative approach to identify the tourism journals most often cited in other disciplines. Part of this iteration involved the identification of non-tourism disciplines most commonly cross-cited cited with tourism. This step is a precaution