Geographic emphasis as a driver of citations in tourism research

Specifying the geographical scope of the research is relatively common in tourism. This is one possible approach to recognizing the importance of the context to the research and its results. This research note aims to analyze the effect of the geographical emphasis on citations to tourism articles. This is achieved by analyzing the citations of 31,330 articles from 50 tourism journals. The results show that focusing on the geographical scope of the research yields lower expected citations. Articles with country or region names in their titles are cited less frequently than their counterparts. The expected number of citations is 9.9 lower for titles with country names and 10.2 lower for titles with region names. These results shed light on characteristics of impactful research.