Selecting the appropriate leading journal in Hospitality and Tourism research: a guide based on the topic-journal fit and the JCR impact factor

Abstract

Selecting the appropriate academic journal is a priority issue for researchers in the process of publishing a manuscript. If researchers could quantify the research topic in terms of its fit with the journal requirements before the submission of a paper, then the assessment of journal suitability could be much easier. Basing any decision on journal impact factors alone might obviously result in a mismatch, eventual rejection and a consequent loss of time. Taking the twelve leading Tourism and Hospitality journals as a reference, the main research topics mentioned in the abstracts of 20,381 articles are identified, using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm and other text-mining techniques running the R programming language. Subsequently, a quantitative measure of the fit of the research topics in each journal is offered according to their frequency of occurrence. The results suggested that the importance of the topic-journal fit with respect to the impact factor depended on the variance of the fits among the journals. Finally, a guide of the most suitable journals for the topics is presented, based on the JCR impact factor and the fit of the topic. Some recommendations are likewise offered on the use of this methodology and its limitations.