Revealing the Nature of Contemporary Tourism Research: Extracting Common Subject Areas through Bibliographic Coupling Yulan Yuan,

Ulrike Gretzel and Yuen-Hsien Tseng International Journal of Tourism Research (2014) Yuan et al. (2014) applied bibliographic coupling in order to determine common subject areas in current tourism research. The authors used CATAR (Content Analysis Toolkit for Academic Research) to conduct the bibliometric analysis. The authors analyzed a total of 2.254 journal articles published in 10 prominent tourism journals during 2008-2012. Yuan et al. (2014) provided a detailed analysis of the identified tourism research areas including graphical representation in tables and figures. This article is of high value for young scholars at the beginning of a research activity in the tourism field. The reader obtains a ranking of the most influential authors of each research category. This enables scholars to learn about the central issues of a specific topic in a shorter period of time as a pre-selection has already been undertaken for them. Nonetheless, it should be mentioned that Yuans et al. (2014) analysis is limited to five years and to a sole database (SSCI). Young scholars should examine a longer period of time and other databases in order to get a complete picture of the research area. This is of great importance since the tourism field is very dynamic and it is important to know how a concept has evolved through the years in order to fully understand it.