What gets cited in food tourism research?

Food tourism has become a prominent domain within tourism scholarship, engaging with debates on authenticity, sustainability, heritage governance, and destination branding. As citation-based metrics have increasingly shaped academic evaluation systems, this paper contributes to the understanding of what drives citation visibility. This research letter explores the 19 highly cited food tourism papers indexed in Scopus to identify the structural characteristics associated with sustained citation accumulation. The analysis reveals two citation-intensive phases: an early foundational period (2003–2009) and a later expansion and integration period (2015–2021). However, we acknowledge that citations measure academic circulation rather than appropriate research impact, particularly in applied domains such as food tourism. Based on how citation logic evolves over time, this study contributes to the understanding of visibility and impact in tourism research.