Brazilian tourism journals

evaluation of its intellectual structure, by means of bibliographic coupling (authors and documents)

Abstract

We evaluate the intellectual structure of 16 Brazilian tourism journals, by means of the citation and co-citation of 108,595 references from 3,887 articles (1990-2018). We aim to provide an overview of this intellectual structure, to present rankings of the most influential authors and documents, and to “map” the intellectual structure (themes, subfields, etc.). Over the decades, the intellectual structure has become increasingly more complex and robust. The continuous growth of the average and median of references per article and the increase in the importance of journal articles indicate, ceteris paribus, that bibliographic coupling networks tend to reveal, more accurately, this intellectual structure, with its subfields, themes, and schools of thought. However, despite this increase, there are still few journal articles among the most influential and co-cited documents. The great influence and centrality of textbooks and/or introductory books is evident, stepped up by manuals of research methodology, which, together, indicate a certain predominance of qualitative research. In the social science clusters, the domain of books is evident, with few highly cited journal articles. There is a marked influence of sociology, anthropology, and geography. In clusters of tourism business, works centered on tourist destinations predominate. It should be noted that, in the bibliographic coupling networks (authors and documents), given that their center is composed by widely used authors and books, the subfields and main themes of the intellectual structure are only observable in the semi periphery and periphery of these networks.