Academic foundations of hospitality management research with an emerging country focus: A citation and co-citation analysis

This study explores the academic foundations of hospitality management research within an emerging country using bibliometric analysis citation and co-citation analysis. Turkey was chosen as a starting point to assess existing research within an emerging country framework because of the large impact of tourism and hospitality (T/H) on the economy and increasing amount of academic research in the field. A total of 76 hospitality management research articles from 1992 to 2013 were found in leading international T/H journals indexed by SSCI. Findings showed that over one-half of the research comes from publications engaging outside of the T/H field. Patterns emerged between T/H and management, marketing and psychology fields that indicated evolving maturity in the research. An intense dependency on supporting journals for substantiation existed and intra-disciplinary maturity was weak, but growing. Accordingly, referring to the findings related to the study, the article discusses limitations of the study and future steps. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.