Academic Contributions in Asian Tourism Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Bibliometrics is a fundamental field of information science that helps to draw quantitative conclusions about bibliographic material. During the last decade, the use of techniques and bibliometric studies has experienced a significant increase due to the improvement of information technology and its usefulness to organize knowledge in a scientific discipline. This paper presents an overview of the most productive and influential Asian universities and countries in academic tourism research through the use of bibliometric indicators, according to information found in the database Web of Science (WoS). This database is considered one of the main tools for the analysis of scientific information. In order to analyze the information obtained, several rankings of universities and countries have been carried out, both global and individual, based on a series of bibliometric indicators, such as the number of publications, the number of citations and h-index. Analyzing the results, we observe that within tourism research in Asia, the most influential countries are China, Taiwan and South Korea, and that the leading university is Hong Kong Polytechnic University.