Influence ratio: An alternate means to assess the relative influence of hospitality and tourism journals on research

Abstract

This paper proposes an alternative metric to assess the relative influence journals have on research by using an influence ratio measure. Hospitality and tourism journals are used as a case study. Influence ratio enables a suite of journals to be evaluated through the calculation of a score for each journal that reflects the share of citations and the share of papers it produces against all citations and all papers in the set. A higher influence ratio score signifies that a journal is proportionately more influential, for it generates a greater share of citations than the share of papers published would suggest. The study evaluated three sets of hospitality and tourism journals (17 hospitality, 41 tourism and a combined set of 54 hospitality and tourism journals). The study illustrates the efficacy of using the influence ratio metric. A small number of journals in each field play a disproportionately strong influence in informing scholarship, with a long tail of relatively less influential journals observed.