dilevko.indd


216 College & Research Libraries May 2004

                 

        

 
          

         
 

           

          

 

   
  
     

   

   

     

    

     
  

     
    

     

Improving Collection Development 
and Reference Services for 
Interdisciplinary Fields through 
Analysis of Citation Pa erns: An 
Example Using Tourism Studies 

Juris Dilevko and Keren Dali 

Analyzing the citation characteristics of the scholarly production of an 
interdisciplinary field according to the kind of research methodology 
employed can provide much valuable information that can be used to 
improve both collection development decisions and reference services. 
Focusing on tourism studies, this article shows how a detailed breakdown 
of citations by Library of Congress (LC) classification can help librarians 
manage the information scatter that is typically associated with interdisci-
plinary fields. Data about the percentage of cited material from particular 
LC classes and subclasses that are used in the collective research output 
of an interdisciplinary field can be helpful in identifying types of material 
for purchase that otherwise may be overlooked. In addition, by identifying 
LC classes and subclasses that generate many citations, librarians can 
closely examine individual citations from these classes to get a detailed 
sense of how interdisciplinary scholars do their intellectual work, thus 
allowing them to better understand and anticipate the future information 
needs of these scholars. 

he existence of interdisci-
plinary academic endeavor 
should, by now, be a given. 
Scholars talk and collabo-

rate with colleagues belonging to many 
disciplines and subdisciplines outside 
their own core areas. Working in groups 
or individually, they read widely in, and 
adopt insights from, diverse fields and 
subfields for use in their own research. In 

so doing, they hope to inform their work 
with contextual richness, new perspec-
tives, and bold theories. O en new fields 
and subfields result from the process 
of interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. 
But interdisciplinarity is by no means 
easy because scholars must acculturate 
themselves in a subject area or areas with 
which they have very li le familiarity. 
As Don Spanner observed in a study of 

Juris Dilevko and Keren Dali are members of the faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto; 
e-mail: dilevko@fis.utoronto.ca and dali@fis.utoronto.ca. 

216 

mailto:dali@fis.utoronto.ca
mailto:dilevko@fis.utoronto.ca


   

    
     
   

       

     

     

      
     

      

     
   

    
   

     

 

    
   

     

     

     

      

 
      

     
      

 

      
       

 

     

      
 

      

     
     
      

       

     
    

    
       

Improving Collection Development and Reference Services 217 

twenty-three Canadian interdisciplinary 
scholars, interdisciplinary work is much 
like “border crossings”—filled with ten-
sion, different cultural imperatives, and 
conflicting vocabularies.1 As interdisci-
plinarity evolves into an essential part of 
the knowledge system and structures of 
colleges and universities, librarians are 
faced with finding ways to adequately 
serve an increasingly interdisciplinary 
campus. 

How best to do so? There have been 
a empts to understand the elements of 
the research processes of interdisciplin-
ary scholars in the humanities and social 
sciences, but if any conclusion is to be 
drawn from such efforts, it is that almost 
every scholar has her or his complex and 
unique way of exploring, identifying, and 
using information sources. For example, 
Carole L. Palmer and Laura J. Neumann, 
in an analysis of the “information work” 
of twenty-five interdisciplinary scholars, 
commented on “the mutable intellectual 
course” followed by these scholars. “Paths 
of inquiry are long, unpredictable,” thus 
leading to “a relatively unique path of 
information seeking for each project.”2 
In another study, Palmer, noting that “sci-
entists and engineers need to know more 
than in the past if they wish to succeed in 
hybrid research areas,” concluded that in-
terdisciplinary researchers “use divergent 
information strategies” because they have 
many different abilities, temperaments, 
and backgrounds and because they are 
accustomed to using “different methods, 
techniques, and instrumentations” from 
their own fields.3 

For librarians, such conclusions are of 
limited use. A er all, most librarians are 
acutely aware that “[s]cholars scan large 
amounts of text to identify segments that 
intersect with their path of inquiry,” that 
they “actively extend their intellectual 
province through information work,” 
and that they have “developed a state of 

preparedness by maintaining a high level 
of interaction with a wide variety of in-
formation.”4 For all intents and purposes, 
these are the basic components of the job 
description of any professor in any field. 
To help interdisciplinary scholars in a 
concrete way, librarians need more than 
generalities. They need to provide what 
Palmer referred to as “tools that function 
as boundary objects”—tools that enable 
scholars to probe more easily into “pe-
ripheral areas to increase their breadth of 
perspective and to generate new ideas.”5 
In other words, librarians need to manage 
information sca er in all its manifesta-
tions, whether in the spatial or intellectual 
organization of collections.6 In so doing, 
they can help scholars find “information 
leeway,” defined as “a range of initiatives 
that make room for, or create the freedom 
to do, interdisciplinary work.”7 Accord-
ing to Lynn Westbrook, the development 
of such initiatives is of vital importance 
because many scholars in such interdis-
ciplinary fields as women’s studies, for 
example, stress that what they most need 
is “concrete support in exploring the issue 
at hand.”8 Indeed, many of them assert 
that “I need a librarian to ask questions 
to get me to see my research focus in a 
different light” or a librarian who can 
help find “[a] way to conceptualize my 
problem … talking through the idea and 
ge ing her response and knowledge.”9 
More than ever, librarians find themselves 
called upon to be proactive participants in 
interdisciplinary research pursuits. 

Purpose 
The purpose of this article is to make 
librarians aware that they can derive spe-
cific knowledge about the scholarly infor-
mation needs of various interdisciplinary 
fields through an analysis of the citation 
characteristics of the research production 
of those fields. To be sure, analysis of 
citation characteristics is a time-honored 



 

     
         

       
    

      
      

     
      

    
       

     

    

      

     

    

       

 
       

      
      

  

    

  
    

    
 

     

    
      

    
     

     

    

 
     

 

      
    

  

      
     

      
    

     
     

  
     

 

     

     

218 College & Research Libraries 

bibliographic approach. But, as the au-
thors of this study hope to show, it has the 
untapped potential to create content-rich 
road maps about the wide range of subject 
ma er that interdisciplinary scholars dis-
cuss in their research. As a demonstration 
of this approach, the authors focus on 
tourism studies. They describe the current 
state of tourism studies based on analysis 
of citation characteristics of full-length 
research articles in two of the most impor-
tant peer-reviewed journals in the field, 
paying particular a ention to differences 
in citation characteristics according to the 
type of research methodology employed 
in the examined articles and disciplines/ 
fields of study, as determined by Library 
of Congress (LC) classification classes 
and subclasses. Data about the percent-
age of cited material from particular LC 
classes and subclasses that are used in 
an interdisciplinary field can be helpful 
in identifying not only the various kinds 
of subject ma er used in that field, but 
also the way in which that subject ma er 
is used by scholars. Closely examining 
individual citations from LC classes thus 
allows librarians to get a good sense of 
how interdisciplinary scholars do their 
intellectual work (i.e., make connections 
among disparate subject areas). This, in 
turn, will allow librarians to ask the kinds 
of questions that cause interdisciplinary 
scholars “to see [their] research focus in 
a different light.”10 

A few words need to be said about 
tourism studies. Broadly speaking, tour-
ism may be defined as “the movement 
of people for pleasure.”11 The study of 
tourism—tourism studies—analyzes this 
movement as a “sociocultural phenom-
enon,” understanding that tourism has 
become fully “instuitutionaliz[ed] in the 
everyday social fabric of peoples every-
where.” 12 Tourism studies has gradually 
undergone a process of scientification 
in the period 1960–2000 as it has moved 

May 2004 

through four stages: advocatory; caution-
ary; adaptancy; and knowledge based.13 
This last stage situates tourism studies 
as a social science, recognizing that “[n]o 
single discipline alone can accommodate, 
treat, or understand tourism; it can be 
studied only if disciplinary boundar-
ies are crossed and if multidisciplinary 
perspectives are sought and formed.”14 
Tourism studies thus draws upon a large 
number of fields, including anthropology, 
ecology, economics, history, psychology, 
and sociology, among others.15 But, as in 
many evolving academic areas, very li le 
agreement exists on how to label tourism 
studies. Opinions vary about whether to 
call it a field or a discipline, or whether it 
is or is not a field or a discipline.16 More-
over, there are o en bi er debates about 
the types of methodology to adopt in 
studying tourism and whether tourism 
studies lacks direction and maturity. 17,18 
As in other evolving academic areas, the 
very fact of its interdisciplinarity or multi-
disciplinarity is o en held against tourism 
studies. In many ways, then, the relatively 
new interdisciplinary field of tourism 
studies resembles the relatively new inter-
disciplinary field of women’s studies with 
regard to internal debates and issues. But 
whereas librarians are familiar with many 
of the issues surrounding women’s stud-
ies in the university, they are less familiar 
with tourism studies.19 

To portray the state of tourism studies 
in North America, the following research 
questions (RQ) were developed: 

1. Which academic institutions in the 
United States and Canada have a signifi-
cant number of scholars pursuing active 
research in tourism studies? 

2. Which geographic regions are the 
most frequent subjects of tourism research 
studies? 

3. What are the types of research 
methodologies most commonly used in 
tourism studies? 

http:studies.19
http:discipline.16
http:others.15
http:based.13


     
     

     

   
      

     

    
        

      
   

     

    

      
   

    

     
 

      

     
     

        

        

     

 

 
       

     
 

 

   
      

     

    

    
       

     

     
   

      

      
       

        
      

        
     

     
         

       
      

Improving Collection Development and Reference Services 219 

4. What types of sources (e.g., articles, 
books, newspapers, reports, etc.) are most 
commonly used by tourism scholars, and 
how old are the sources they use? 

5. What are the most frequently cited 
journal and book titles in tourism stud-
ies? 

6. Do North American institutions 
that have a significant number of scholars 
pursuing active research in tourism own 
the most frequently cited journal and 
book titles in tourism studies? 

7. What are the main disciplines/fields 
of study of the cited material used by tour-
ism scholars, based on LC main classes 
and subclasses? 

8. Are there any differences with re-
gard to disciplines/fields of study of cited 
materials among different publication 
venues for tourism research? 

9. Is there a relationship between the 
type of research methodology used in 
tourism studies and disciplines/fields of 
study of cited materials? 

In general, the methodology described 
below and the research questions men-
tioned here can be applied to any evolv-
ing or evolved interdisciplinary field in 
order to create an objective portrait of 
that field’s intellectual interconnections 
and tendencies that librarians can use in 
their collection development and refer-
ence work. 

Methodology 
As their initial sampling frame, the au-
thors selected tourism and travel journals 
contained in the Journal Citation Reports 
(JCR) published by the Institute for Sci-
entific Information (ISI). JCR is a selective 
index that, for its 2002 edition, included 
about 1,700 social science journals, and 
the journals selected for inclusion are 
deemed, whether rightly or wrongly, to 
be the most important in any given field.20 
Although there are many peer-reviewed 
journals in the field of tourism and travel 

(as well as in the related field of recreation 
and leisure), only two were contained in 
JCR when the present study was begun 
in November 2002: Annals of Tourism 
Research (ATR) and Tourism Management 
(TM).21 All issues for these two titles for 
the years 2000–2002 were included in the 
present study.22 

Both titles are indexed in the Social Sci-
ences Citation Index (SSCI), also published 
by ISI. For the years 2000–2002, SSCI in-
dexed 272 items from ATR and 240 items 
from TM. The authors downloaded com-
plete bibliographical information, includ-
ing cited sources, from these 512 items 
into the EndNote bibliographic so ware 
program using the “Export to Reference 
So ware” feature on the “Marked Re-
cords” page in SSCI. This became Biblio-
graphical Database A. Downloaded items 
were classified by ISI as follows: article, 
review, book review, biographical item, 
editorial material, and correction. Only 
items designated in ISI as an article or 
a review were selected to form the basis 
of the present study because full-length 
research articles are the best indicators 
of interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary 
trends. In addition, all ISI designations 
were double-checked against full-text 
published items in ATR and TM. For 
instance, if an item designated by ISI as 
an article or review appeared in the jour-
nal itself as a research report or research 
note, it was excluded from the analysis. 
All items chosen for further analysis are 
therefore full-length research papers. 

In total, there were 142 full-length 
research articles in ATR and 149 such ar-
ticles in TM in the period 2000–2002. The 
authors then selected only those articles 
that had at least one author affiliated with 
a North American institution (United 
States or Canada).23 Theoretically, these 
are the authors in the field of tourism that 
would make use of North American library 
resources and have contact with North 

http:Canada).23
http:study.22
http:field.20


 

       
       
      

        
       

     
      

    
    

    
      

      
    

       
      

 
     
     

 

 

      
 

 
       

       

     
    

       

      
 

    

  

 
      

     
    

     
     

       
 

     
 

     
 
 

     

    

     
 

     

    
      

    
      

      
    

     
    

      
      

     
   

     

220 College & Research Libraries 

American librarians. As a result, the final 
set of full-length research articles used in 
the present study contained 80 articles—41 
from ATR and 39 from TM. The geographic 
area to which the research pertained was 
recorded.24 Finally, each article was catego-
rized according to its broad research meth-
odological type: qualitative, quantitative, 
qualitative and quantitative, theoretical, 
or review.25 Relevant bibliographic infor-
mation about the 80 articles from Biblio-
graphical Database A was transferred into 
Bibliographical Spreadsheet A, relational 
links were made between them, and each 
article was assigned a unique identification 
(ID) number. 

All citations appearing in these 80 
articles were downloaded from the previ-
ously mentioned EndNote database into 
another Excel spreadsheet (Bibliographi-
cal Spreadsheet B) in the order in which 
they appeared in the ISI citation fields.26 
Citations were numbered consecutively 
for each journal. There were 1,965 citations 
for ATR and 1,517 citations for TM. There 
were 3,482 total citations, 56.4 percent of 
which came from ATR and 43.6 percent 
from TM. A sample of 559 citations was 
drawn from this total; a sample of this 
size has a confidence level of 99 percent 
with a confidence interval of five (5).27 The 
number of citations to be sampled from 
each journal was determined based on 
the percentage of citations contributed 
by each journal to the total number of 
downloaded citations. From the sample 
of 559 citations, 315 (56.4%) came from 
ATR and 244 (43.6%) from TM. Random 
numbers for sampling were generated 
using the online statistical tool Research 
Randomizer.28 

Complete bibliographic information 
for each of the 559 sampled citations was 
obtained from Online Computer Library 
Center (OCLC) databases such as World-
Cat, PapersFirst, and Proceedings,29 and 
a complete record of each citation was 

May 2004 

exported from these OCLC sources into 
a second EndNote database. This became 
Bibliographical Database B. The following 
additional fields were created for each 
citation: type of source;30 LC classifica-
tion of the discipline to which the citation 
belongs;31 and descriptive titles of the LC 
classes and subclasses from LC schedules. 
A unique ID was assigned to each cita-
tion. The authors then interlinked each 
of Bibliographical Spreadsheets A and B 
with Bibliographical Databases A and B 
through the assigned ID numbers. These 
linked databases and spreadsheets thus 
contained all necessary data to portray 
the state of tourism studies. The results 
reported below were obtained through a 
series of pivot tables on the linked data-
bases and spreadsheets. 

Results 
Which colleges and universities in North 
American employ scholars producing the 
most research articles in tourism (RQ-1)? 
Based on analysis of author affiliations 
in ATR and TM, the top institutions for 
tourism research are: Virginia Tech (12); 
Texas A&M (11); Northern Arizona (7); 
University of Central Florida, University 
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and 
University of Nevada at Las Vegas (5 
each); Arizona State, Iowa State, Purdue, 
University of Alberta, and University 
of Georgia (4 each); and University of 
Calgary, University of Washington, and 
Washington State (3 each). 

With regard to the geographic regions 
that are the subjects of tourism research 
(RQ-2), the United States (either as a 
whole, individual states, U.S. tourists 
in other countries, interactions of U.S. 
tourists/hosts with people from other 
countries, etc.) is the central subject of 
27 articles (33.8%), and Canada is the 
central subject of seven articles (8.8%). 
Latin America (Dominican Republic, 
Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru) and the 

http:Randomizer.28
http:fields.26
http:review.25
http:recorded.24


     
      

     
      

     
      

     

    

 
   

       
 

     
     

      
     

    
       

        

 

      
       

       

  

 

Improving Collection Development and Reference Services 221 

TABLE 1 
Tourism Articles (from Annals of Tourism Research and Tourism 
Management) by Type of Research and Research Methodology (n = 80) 

Type of research 

Research Methodology 

Qualitative 
and 

Quantitative Qualitative Quantitative 
Theoretical 
or Review 

Theoretical analysis/review 11 
Case study 1 
Content analysis; content analysis 
& secondary data analysis; content 
analysis, ecological traverse, inter-
view, & observations 

3 2 1 1 

Data modeling; data modeling & 
secondary data analysis 

5 1 

Ethnography 2 
Secondary data analysis 1 
Survey 36 
Survey & interview; survey & 
secondary data analysis; survey, in-
terview & secondary data analysis; 
survey, interview & observations; 
survey, interview & focus groups; 
survey & focus groups 

5 4 

Interview; interview, focus groups 
& grounded theory; interview, field 
notes, documents & case study 

7 

Total 8 11 47 14 

Caribbean are researched in eight articles 
(10%); Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Tai-
wan in seven (8.8%); the Mediterranean 
countries (Egypt, Greece, Israel, Italy, and 
Turkey) in four (5%); Australia, New Zea-
land, and African countries (Ghana, South 
Africa, and Tanzania) in three articles each 
(11.25%); and Eastern Europe (Russia and 
Latvia) in two (2.5%). Eight articles focus 
on multiple countries, including such 
combinations as the United States/South 
Africa, Sweden/Denmark/Germany, 
United States/Turkey, and “developing 
countries.” Another eight articles are not 
linked to any specific region or country. 

As shown in table 1, the majority of 
articles in ATR and TM use quantitative 

methods (47, or 58.8%); 11 are qualitative 
(13.8%); eight (10%) combine qualitative 
and quantitative methods; and 14 (17.5%) 
are theoretical and/or review articles (RQ-
3). ATR hosts more qualitative research ar-
ticles (8, or 19.5%) and qualitative–quanti-
tative articles (7, or 17.1%) than does TM 
(1, or 2.6%; 3, or 7.7%, respectively). The 
percentage of theoretical/review articles is 
almost equal in the two publications (7, or 
17.1% in ATR; 7, or 17.9% in TM), whereas 
the percentage of quantitative articles is 
much lower in ATR (19, or 46.3%) than in 
TM (28, or 71.8%). 

Tourism scholarship relies to a great 
extent on other academic journals in its 
citations. As shown in table 2, academic 



 

      
      

       
      
     

      
      

         
      
       
       

      
    

       
     

     
   

       
    

    
       

       
        

      
      

       
        

        
    

       

    

      

  
      

       

  
    

   

      

     

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

222 College & Research Libraries 

journals comprise 50.1 percent of cited 
materials, with books at 20.2 percent. 
Reports and statistics are used only 4.3 
percent of the time, whereas conference 
papers and proceedings (3.8%) and 
Ph.D. dissertations (1.8%) are used even 
less (RQ-4). To examine the distribution 
of citations by type of source in each of 
the two journals, the authors collapsed 
the fi een categories shown in table 2 
into nine categories.32 TM has a slightly 
higher percentage of citations than ATR 
in six categories: academic/scholarly 
journals (129, or 52.9% versus 151, or 
47.9%); reports/statistics (13, or 5.3% 
versus 11, or 3.5%); consumer maga-
zine/trade publication/newsle er (12, 
or 4.9% versus 11, or 3.5%); conference 
papers/conference proceedings (10, or 
4.1% versus 11, or 3.5%); newspaper 
(print and online) and broadcast (11, or 
4.5% versus 6, or 1.9%); and electronic 
resources (2, or 0.8% versus 1, or 0.3%).33 
Conversely, ATR has a slightly higher 
percentage of cited sources than does 
TM in three categories: books and edited 
books (94, or 29.8% versus 51, or 20.9%); 
book chapters (21, or 6.7% versus 14, or 
5.7%); and Ph.D. dissertation/master ’s 
thesis (9, or 2.9% versus 2, or 0.8%). 

As is the case with most physical sci-
ences and social sciences researchers, 

TABLE 3 
Citations by Year of Publication 

of Cited Source (n = 559) 
Years of 
Publication Number (%)* 
1900–1960 6 (1.1) 
1961–1970 8 (1.4) 
1971–1980 50 (8.9) 
1981–1990 159 (28.4) 
1991–1995 180 (32.2) 
1996–2000 145 (25.9) 
2001–2002 11 (2) 
* Does not add to 100 because of rounding 

May 2004 

TABLE 2 
Citations by Type of Source Cited 

(n = 559) 
Type of Source Number (%)* 
Academic/scholarly journal 280 (50.1) 
Book 113  (20.2) 
Book chapter 35 (6.3) 
Edited book 32 (5.7) 
Report or statistics 24 (4.3) 
Newspaper (print or online) 16 (2.9) 
Conference paper 14 (2.5) 
Trade publication 13 (2.3) 
Ph.D. dissertation 10 (1.8) 
Consumer magazine 9 (1.6) 
Conference proceedings 7 (1.3) 
Electronic resource 3 (0.5) 
Broadcast 1 (0.2) 
Master’s thesis 1 (0.2) 
Newsletter 1 (0.2) 
* Does not add to 100 because of rounding 

tourism scholars have a tendency to cite 
recent literature frequently (also RQ-4). 
There were more than twice as many 
citations to material published in the de-
cade 1991–2000 (325) than in the decade 
1981–1990 (159). As shown in table 3, the 
greatest frequency of citations in articles 
published in 2000–2002 in ATR and TM 
is to material that was published between 
1991 and 1995. The absolute peak years for 
cited material were 1993–1998.34 

Twenty-three academic journals, 
fourteen book titles, two consumer 
magazines/trade publications, and two 
newspapers were cited more than once 
in the citations studied here, and these 
are listed in descending order in table 4. 
Taken together, these publications could 
be said to comprise the core of tourism 
research literature (RQ-5).35 Within the set 
of 23 academic journals, one finds such 
titles as American Sociological Review, Psy-

http:RQ-5).35
http:1993�1998.34
http:0.3%).33
http:categories.32


 

 

Improving Collection Development and Reference Services 223 

TABLE 4 
Titles Cited More than Once by Type of Source 

Type of source Title (times cited) 
Academic journal 
(23) 

Annals of Tourism Research (83) 
Journal of Travel Research (48) 
Tourism Management (13) 
Journal of Marketing (7) 
JMR, Journal of Marketing Research (6) 
Leisure Sciences (6) 
Journal of Leisure Research (5) 
Journal of Consumer Research (4) 
Tourism Analysis (4) 
European Journal of Marketing (3) 
Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing (3) 
Journal of Vacation Marketing (3) 
Psychological Bulletin (3) 
Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly (3) 
American Sociological Review (2) 
Australian Journal of Hospitality Management (2) 
Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy (2) 
Journal of Park and Recreation Administration (2) 
Journal of Sustainable Tourism (2) 
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (2) 
Theory, Culture & Society (2) 
Tourism Recreation Research (2) 
Wildlife Society Bulletin (2) 

Book 
book for cited
 book chapters, 
edited book (14) 

Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism (4) 
Tourism: Principles, Practices, Philosophies (3) 
The Business of Rural Tourism: International Perspectives (2) 
Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth 
World (2) 
The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Pe-
riphery (2) 
Handbook of Qualitative Research (2) 
Naturalistic Inquiry (2) 
Principles of Marketing (2) 
The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (2) 
Tourism Analysis: A Handbook (2) 
Tourism and Sustainable Development: Monitoring, Planning, 
Managing (2) 
Tourism, Ethnicity, and the State in Asian and Pacific Societies (2) 
Travel, Tourism, and Hospitality Research: A Handbook for Manag-
ers and Researchers (2) 
The Sociology of Tourism: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations 
(2) 

Newspaper (2) Miami Herald (7) 
New York Times (3) 

Consumer 
magazine or trade 
publication (2) 

Canadian Geographic (2) 
Ski Area Management (2) 



 

      

   
    

   

     

   

       

 

   
 

  
 

 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 
 

224 College & Research Libraries 

chological Bulletin, and Theory, Culture & 
Society. In addition, there are 71 academic 
journals that are cited only once. These 
71 journals represent a diverse array of 
interests: American Anthropologist, Clothing 
and Textile Research Journal, International 
Journal of Intercultural Relations, Journal of 
American Folklore, Journal of Asian Studies, 
Journal of Peasant Studies, Public Opinion 

May 2004 

Quarterly, Qualitative Sociology, Religion, 
Sexuality & Culture, and the Yale Journal 
of Regulation, to mention only a few. Of 
the fourteen books, eleven are tourism 
specific and three are from the areas of 
philosophy, research methodology, or 
marketing. 

Do the six libraries in the United States 
and Canada whose universities employ 

TABLE 5 
Citations by Discipline Based on LC Classes and Subclasses (Broad 

Disciplines and Fields of Study within a Discipline) (n = 559) 
LC Main Class/ 
Subclass Letters 

Disciplines and Fields of Study within a Discipline 
(descriptions based on LC main/subclass titles) 

Number of 
Citations (%) 

G149–550 Travel & Tourism 253 (45.3) 
GV 
H, HA, HB, HC, 
HD, HE, HF, HG 

Recreation & Leisure 
Social Sciences (General). Statistics. Economics. 
Industries and Industrial Management. Agricultural 
Classes. Transportations and Communications. Com-
merce. Business. Marketing. Finance 

33 (5.9) 
89 (15.9) 

HM, HN, HQ, 
HT, HV 

Sociology. Social History and conditions. Social prob-
lems. Social reforms. The family. Marriage. Women. 
Communities. Classes. Races. Social pathology. Social 
and public welfare. Criminology 

43 (7.7) 

QA, QH, R, S, 
SB, SD, SK, T, 
TL, TP, TS, TX, 
UF 

Science. Medicine. Agriculture. Technology. Military 
Science 

32 (5.7) 

CB, DA, DK, 
DS, E, F 

History of Civilization. History (General) and History 
of Europe (History of Great Britain. History of Rus-
sia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics. History 
of Asia.) History: America (America. United States. 
United States local history. British America (includ-
ing Canada). Dutch America. French America. Latin 
America. Spanish America) 

28 (5) 

AN, AP, AZ General Works (Newspapers. Periodicals. History of 
scholarship and learning. The humanities) 

22 (3.9) 

B, BD, BF, BL Philosophy. Psychology. Religion 20 (3.6) 
GF, GN, GR Human ecology. Anthropogeography. Anthropology. 

Folklore. 
18 (3.2) 

G (excludes 
149–550), GB, 
GC, GE 

Geography (General). Physical geography. Oceanogra-
phy. Environmental sciences 

8 (1.4) 

N, P, PK, PN Fine Arts, Languages and Literatures 7 (1.3) 
K, KF, KJA, KZ, 
LB 

Law. Education 6 (1.1) 



  

      

     

       
     
     

      
    

     

      
    

      

      
   

     

       
      

    
     

      
     

      
      

    
  

 

      

     
      
     

     
 

   
     
   

     

     
 

     
     

     

       
     

     
        

     
 

     

  
      

 
     

      
     

     

       

   
     

     

Improving Collection Development and Reference Services 225 

tourism scholars who published five or 
more times in ATR and TM have the 23 
core academic journals and 14 book titles 
in their collections (RQ-6)?36 Four of these 
six universities have 20 or more of the 23 
core academic journals in their library 
systems, with the University of Nevada 
at Las Vegas having the most (22) and 
the University of Central Florida (17) 
and Northern Arizona University (14) the 
least. Four of the six universities have 13 
or 14 of the 14 core books in their librar-
ies, with the University of Nevada at Las 
Vegas and the University of Illinois at 
Urbana-Champaign having the most (14) 
and Northern Arizona University (11) and 
the University of Central Florida (11) the 
least. Twelve of the 23 journals were held 
by all six libraries. The least frequently 
held journals were Tourism Recreation 
Research (2) and Journal of Vacation Market-
ing (1). Thirteen of the 14 book titles were 
held by either five or six libraries; only 
one title, The Business of Rural Tourism: 
International Perspectives, was infrequently 
held (2 libraries). 

Tourism scholars make use of citations 
from a wide variety of disciplines/fields 
of study (RQ-7). As shown in table 5, 
citations from within the field of travel 
and tourism itself or the related field of 
recreation and leisure (i.e., what we call 
tourism disciplines) comprise 51.2 percent 
of all citations. Citations from diverse 
other fields, ranging from anthropology 
to economics to history to literature to 
medicine to psychology to sociology (col-
lectively called nontourism disciplines), 
make up 48.8 percent of the citations 
(table 5). A closer examination of the 
citations from the nontourism disciplines 
shows that tourism is being researched 
as both “a trade or an industry” and “a 
sociocultural phenomenon.”37 Of the 273 
citations from nontourism disciplines, 89 
(32.6%) are, broadly speaking, from busi-
ness, economics, and finance; 43 (15.8%) 

from sociology; 32 (11.7%) from science 
and medicine; 28 (10.3%) from history; 20 
(7.3%) from philosophy and psychology; 
18 (6.6%) from anthropology; seven (2.6%) 
from arts and literature; and six (2.2%) 
from education and law.38 These broad 
disciplines are, of course, composed of 
numerous subfields. A listing of the LC 
main class and subclass titles of some of 
these non-tourism disciplines indicates 
that tourism studies is a tremendously 
rich interdisciplinary field, substantiating 
the findings of tourism scholars them-
selves.39 (See tables 6 and 7.) 

Are there any major differences in the 
distribution of citations between ATR 
and TM from the perspective of LC disci-
plines/fields of study from which citations 
are derived (RQ-8)? The percentage of 
citations derived from travel and tourism 
and recreation and leisure is just slightly 
higher in TM (53.2%) than in ATR (49.5%). 
Thus, although both journals derive about 
half of their citations from nontourism 
disciplines (ATR at a rate of 50.5% and TM 
at a rate of 46.8%), there are some slight 
differences in the distribution of those 
disciplines. For example, ATR derives, in 
absolute terms, 2.8 percent more citations 
from American history (LC class F) and 
4.9 percent more citations from sociology 
(LC subclasses HM, HN, HQ, HT, and 
HV) than TM. Conversely, TM derives, in 
absolute terms, 3.4 percent more citations 
from the field of business and commerce 
(LC subclasses HF and HG) than ATR. 
Both journals derive citations from all 
other nontourism disciplines at virtually 
indistinguishable rates (less than 0.5%). 

There are larger differences in the 
nature of citations that are used by dif-
ferent research methods within tourism 
(RQ-9). As shown in table 8, theoretical or 
review articles draw 66.2 percent of their 
citations from nontourism disciplines 
and qualitatively based articles draw 58.2 
percent of their citations from nontourism 

http:selves.39


 

 
  

 

226 College & Research Libraries May 2004 

TABLE 6
	
Citations by Fields of Study within Nontourism Disciplines (Class H)
	

LC Main Number 
Class/Sub- Disciplines and Fields of Study within a Discipline of 
class Letters (descriptions based on LC main/subclass titles) Citations 
H Social sciences (General) 12 
HA Statistics; Theory and method of social science statistics; 4 

Statistical data; By region or country 
HB Economic theory. Demography; Methodology; Mathematical 4 

economics. Quantitative methods including econometrics, 
input–output analysis, game theory 

HC Economic history and conditions; Special topics including air 7 
pollution, automation, consumer demand, famines, flow of 
funds, etc.; By region or country 

HD Industries. Land use. Labor; Management. Industrial manage- 16 
ment; Organizational behavior, change and effectiveness. 
Corporate culture; Management of special enterprises; Other 
including business consultants, capacity, size of industries, 
etc.; Economic growth, development, planning; Agricultural 
classes including farm tenancy, agricultural laborers; Corpora-
tions including international business enterprises, diversi-
fication, industrial concentration, public utilities; Special 
industries and trades; Agricultural industries 

HE Transportation and communications; Air transportation. 4 
Airlines 

HF Commerce; Commercial geography. Economic geography; 39 
Business; Marketing. Distribution of products 

HG Finance; Investment, capital formation, speculation 3 
Total 89 

HM Sociology (General; History of sociology. History of socio- 17 
logical theory; Theory. Method. Relations to other subjects; 
Culture; Social change; Social psychology 

HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform; 9 
By region or country 

HQ The Family. Marriage. Women; Sexual life; Sex instruction 5 
and sexual ethics; Prostitution; The family. Marriage. Home; 
Single people 

HT Communities. Classes. Races; Urban groups. The city. Urban 8 
sociology; City planning; Regional planning; Rural groups. 
Rural sociology; Classes; Caste system; Races Including race 
as a social group and race relations in general 

HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology; 4 
Alcoholism. Intemperance. Temperance reform; Criminology; 
Crimes and offences 
Total 43 



  

 
 

  
 

Improving Collection Development and Reference Services 227 

TABLE 7
	
Citations by Fields of Study within Selected Nontourism Disciplines
	

LC Main Number 
Class/Sub- Disciplines and Fields of Study within a Discipline of 
class Letters (descriptions based on LC main/subclass titles) Citations 
CB Auxiliary Sciences of History. History of Civilization. 2 
DA History of Great Britain. Description and travel. Guidebooks 1 
DK History of Russia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics. Lo- 1 

cal history and description. Baltic States 
DS History of Asia. (China; East Asia. The Far East; India 7 

(Bharat). Local history and description.; Israel (Palestine). The 
Jews. Ethnography. Tribes of Israel; Japan) 

E United States (General). Elements in the population. Afro- 6 
Americans. 

F Latin America. Spanish America. Mexico. Antiquities. Indians; 11 
Central America. Guatemala.; South America. Peru; British 
America. Canada. Alberta. Ontario; Caribbean area. Caribbean 
SeUnited States local history. New Southwest. Colorado River, 
Canyon, and Valley. New Mexico 
Total 28 

B Philosophy (General); Modern; Special topics and schools of 4 
philosophy 

BD Speculative philosophy; Epistemology. Theory of knowledge 1 
BF Psychology; Philosophy. Relation to other topics; Psycho- 14

analysis; Experimental psychology; Consciousness. Cognition 
Including learning, attention, comprehension, memory, imagi-
nation, genius, intelligence, thought and thinking, psycholin-
guistics, mental fatigue; Affection. Feeling. Emotion; Applied 
psychology 

BL Religions. Mythology. Rationalism; Religion (General) 1 
Total 20 

GF Human ecology. Anthropogeography 4 
GN Anthropology; Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropol- 13 

ogy; Culture and cultural processes Including social change, 
structuralism, diffusion, etc.; Collected ethnographies; Applied 
anthropology; Economic organization. Economic anthropol-
ogy; Social organization; Societal groups, ethnocentrism, 
diplomacy, warfare, etc. 

GR Folklore 1 
Total 18 

N Fine Arts. Visual arts. History 2 
P Language and Literature. Philology. Linguistics. Communica- 1 

tion. Mass media. Oral communication. Speech 
PK Indo-Iranian philology and literature 1 



 

  
     

    

      

        

    

 
     

     

     

    
    

     

   

      

    
   

        
    

      
     

        

    
    

    

    
     

     

  

 
 

  
 

228 College & Research Libraries May 2004 

TABLE 7
	
Citations by Fields of Study within Selected Nontourism Disciplines
	

LC Main 
Class/Sub-
class Letters 
PN 

K 

KF 

KJA 
KZ 
LB 

Disciplines and Fields of Study within a Discipline 
(descriptions based on LC main/subclass titles) 

Literature. Literary history. Collections; Drama. Broadcasting. 
Television broadcasts 
Total 
Law in general. Comparative and uniform law. Jurisprudence. 
Periodicals 
Law of the United States. Federal law. Common and collective 
state law 
Law. Europe. Roman law 
Law of nations. International law and other disciplines 
Education. Theory and practice of education. Higher education 
Total 

Number 
of 

Citations 
3 

7 
2 

1 

1 
1 
1 
6 

disciplines. Conversely, quantitatively 
based articles use citations from nontour-
ism disciplines at a rate of 37.6 percent. 
The most popular nontourism LC class 
ranges from which quantitatively based 
articles draw their 108 citations are H-
HG (51, or 47.2%), QA-TX (18, or 16.7%), 
HM-HV (14, or 13%), and BF (10, or 9.3%). 
On the other hand, the most popular LC 
classes from which qualitatively based 
articles draw their 39 citations are DS-F 
(10, or 25.6%), H-HG (8, 20.5%), HM-HV 
(7, or 17.9%), and GN-GR (4, or 10.3%). 
Theoretical and review articles draw their 
104 citations most frequently from H-HG 
(25, or 24%), HM-HV (17, or 16.3%), and 
A-AZ (16, or 15.4%). Articles making 
use of both qualitative and quantitative 
methods draw their 22 citations most 
frequently from H-HG (5, or 22.7%) and 
HM-HV (5, or 22.7%). 

No matter their preferred research 
methodology, all tourism articles make 
substantial use of social sciences (Class 
H) materials (i.e., sources in economics, 
finance, business, management, and 
marketing, on the one hand, and sociol-
ogy and community studies, on the other) 

with varying degrees of emphasis. There 
are pronounced differences, however, in 
their use of such broad fields as history 
and anthropology and human ecology. 
Whereas quantitatively based articles 
use history citations (7) at a rate of 6.5 
percent and anthropology and human 
ecology citations (3) at a rate of 2.8 per-
cent, qualitatively based articles use his-
tory citations 25.6 percent of the time (10) 
and anthropology citations 10.3 percent 
of the time (4). Theoretical and review 
articles fall somewhere in the middle 
between qualitatively and quantitatively 
based research, using anthropology and 
human ecology citations (9) at a rate of 8.7 
percent and history citations (11) at a rate 
of 10.6 percent. Tables 9 through 11 show 
selected subfields from which qualitative, 
quantitative, and theoretical or review 
articles draw their citations. 

Discussion 
These findings confirm that tourism 
scholars make significant use of sources 
outside their own discipline, drawing 
on such diverse areas as anthropology, 
history, psychology, and sociology at a 



 

   

   
   
   
   

      
    

      
       
     

     

      

 
     

    
      

    
      

       

    

      

     
   

       

        
       

   

       

      

     
   

      
         

      

      
    

      

Improving Collection Development and Reference Services 229 

TABLE 8 
Citations by Type of Discipline and by Type of Research 

in Which They Were Used 

Type of Research 
Travel 

& Tourism (%) 
Recreation 

& Leisure (%) 
Nontourism 

Disciplines (%) 

Theoretical or review (157) 51 (32.5) 2 (1.3) 104 (66.2) 
Quantitative (287) 162 (56.4) 17 (5.9) 108 (37.6) 
Qualitative (67) 25 (37.3) 3 (4.5) 39 (58.2) 
Quantitative and qualitative (48) 15 (31.3) 11 (22.9) 22 (45.8) 

rate of 48.8 percent (table 5). Studying 
tourism citations from 1994–1996, Richard 
M. Howey and colleagues found that 77.3 
percent of citations in six tourism and hos-
pitality journals came from other sources, 
although they did not define what they 
meant by “other sources.”40 One explana-
tion for this divergence may be that even 
in the short period between 1996, the 
last year covered by Howey’s study, and 
2000, the first year covered by this study, 
tourism research has had an increasing 
body of its own tourism studies to draw 
upon. This is a natural development in 
the evolution of a discipline, especially 
a relatively young one such as tourism. 
A greater reliance on within-discipline 
citations may therefore be seen as one 
indication of professional solidification in 
a specific discipline. Still, a discipline that 
continues to cite other disciplines at a rate 
of 48.8 percent is one that is intellectually 
vibrant and outward-looking, alert to the 
intellectual insights of numerous other 
fields. As well, North American tourism 
scholars are doing work about a wide 
variety of geographic areas (e.g., Turkey, 
Ghana, Japan, etc.), a circumstance that 
contributes to their need for research 
material from nontourism disciplines 
and fields. 

The findings also emphasize the fact 
that whereas about half of cited tourism 
material takes the form of academic jour-
nal articles (table 2), the other half comes 
from a wide array of sources, most of 

which are less than ten years old (table 3). 
Tourism also has core sources, as listed in 
table 4. In addition, based on the results 
of author affiliation data, librarians can 
become aware of the names of other uni-
versities housing productive tourism re-
searchers. Knowledge of this kind might 
be invaluable in suggesting networking 
or collaboration possibilities to a tourism 
scholar and in establishing links between 
and among subject-specialty librarians 
serving tourism scholars. 

But perhaps the most important way 
that librarians can use the kind of detailed 
knowledge derived from an analysis of 
citation characteristics to provide be er 
service to tourism researchers is to be-
come more cognizant of the relationship 
between the type of research methodol-
ogy used in a particular tourism article 
and the LC class areas that are typically 
associated with that type of methodology. 
Collection development librarians who 
are responsible for tourism can closely ex-
amine the findings in table 5 to get a sense 
of how they should broadly allocate their 
tourism collection development budget. 
In general, they should be spending only 
about 51.2 percent of their budget on 
material that is traditionally thought of 
as pertaining to the disciplines of tourism 
and recreation, while allocating about 
15.9 percent on H-HG class material, 7.7 
percent on HM-HV material, 5.7 percent 
on QA-UF material, and so on. Moreover, 
depending on the most common types of 



 

    
   

   
    

        

      

 

     
      

   

     
    

      

    
    

       

       

 

 
 

230 College & Research Libraries 

research methodologies used by scholars 
at their institutions’ tourism departments, 
collection development librarians can 
fine-tune their collection development 
acquisitions even more. For example, 
as shown in table 9, 9.3 percent of the 
citations in quantitatively based research 
articles are from psychology; as shown in 
table 10, 25.6 percent of the citations in 
qualitatively based research articles are 
from history; and as shown in table 11, 
8.7 percent are from anthropology and 
human ecology. A library at an institution 
where tourism department researchers 

May 2004 

typically employ one type of research 
methodology may wish to proportion-
ally increase its purchases in those LC 
class areas that are associated with that 
methodology. 

For librarians serving tourism re-
searchers, the information contained in 
tables 9 through 11 is equally compelling 
because it can allow them to investigate in 
detail how tourism scholars use individ-
ual citations from various LC classes and 
subclasses. Accordingly, tables 9 through 
11 are the end result of an intellectual 
model that maps a given discipline/field 

TABLE 9 
Examples of Nontourism Disciplines and Fields of Study from Which 

Quantitative Research Articles Draw Their Citations (108) 
LC Main Class/Subclass 
Letters & Selected Class/ 
Broad Subclass Titles 

Description of Disciplines/Fields 
of Studies Based on LC Class/ 

Subclass Titles 
Sociology (General) 
Social change 

Number of Citations 
from LC Class/ 

Subclass 
3 
1 

HM—Sociology (General). 
Social psychology 
HN—Social history and 
conditions. Social problems. 
Social reform 
HT—Communities. Classes. 
Races 
HV—Social pathology. 
Social and public welfare. 
Criminology (14) 

Social psychology 4 
Sociology. Social history and 
conditions. Social problems. Social 
reform. By region or country 

3 

Communities. Classes. Races. 
Urban groups. The city. Urban 
sociology. City planning 

1 

Communities. Classes. Races. 
Urban groups. The city. Urban 
sociology. Regional planning 

1 

Social pathology. Social and public 
welfare. Criminology. Crimes and 
offenses 
Psychology 

1 

3 

BF—Psychology (10) 
Affection. Feeling. Emotion 2 
Applied psychology 2 
Consciousness. Cognition 2 
Experimental psychology 
Law. Law in general. Comparative 
and uniform law. Jurisprudence. 
Periodicals 

1 
1 

K—Law in general. Com-
parative and uniform law. 
Jurisprudence 
KZ—Law of nations (2) Law. Law of nations. International 

law and other disciplines 
1 



      

     
     

     

    

      

       
    

     

      
      

 

 

Improving Collection Development and Reference Services 231 

TABLE 10 
Examples of Nontourism Disciplines and Fields of Study from Which 

Qualitative Research Articles Draw Their Citations (39) 
LC Main Class/Subclass 
Letters & Selected Class/ 
Broad Subclass Titles 

Description of Disciplines/Fields 
of Studies Based on LC Class/ 

Subclass Titles 
History of Asia. East Asia. The Far 
East 

Number of Citations 
from LC Class/ 

Subclass 
1 

DS—History (General). 
History of Asia 
E, F—History: America 
E—America. United States 
F—United States local 
historyBritish America 
(including Canada) 
Latin America. 
Spanish America (10) 

History of Asia. India (Bharat). Lo-
cal history and description 

1 

History of Asia. Japan 3 
America. Indians of North America 1 
United States. Elements in the 
population. Afro-Americans 

1 

British America. Canada/British 
America. Canada. Ontario 

2 

Latin America. Central America. 
Guatemala 
Sociology. Social psychology 

1 

2 

H—Social Sciences 
HM—Sociology (General). 
Social psychology 
HQ—The Family. Marriage. 
Women 
HT—Communities. Classes. 
Races (7) 

Sexual life/Sexual life. Sex instruc-
tion and sexual ethics 

2 

The Family. Marriage. Women. 
Prostitution 

1 

Communities. Classes. Races. 
Classes. Caste system 

1 

Communities. Classes. Races, 
including race as a social group and 
race relations in general 

1 

of study through a series of databases and 
spreadsheets that interlink recent research 
articles from Field X, information about 
the methodology of these articles, biblio-
graphical information about the citations 
used in these articles, and LC class le ers 
pertaining to these citations. 

In this way, a reference librarian 
could select an LC class description that 
intrigued her or him from these tables, 
be linked to the relevant citation, and 
then examine the article from which the 
citation was taken in order to see how a 
tourism scholar incorporates intellectual 
insights from a specific LC class or sub-
class into her or his own research work. 

The librarian would read the article in 
question, paying special a ention to the 
appearance of the relevant citation and 
noting how that citation advances the 
argument of the article as a whole. This 
strategy allows the reference librarian to 
gain a be er understanding of tourism 
research in general, leading to be er ref-
erence service for students and faculty in 
tourism departments. 

The authors provide some examples 
of how this process works. For example, 
a librarian interested in how quantitative 
tourism researchers (table 9) make use of 
LC class BF (psychology) might choose 
an item classified in LC as “Affection. 



 

 

   
   

  

 
 

   
   

232 College & Research Libraries May 2004 

TABLE 11 
Examples of Nontourism Disciplines and Fields of Study from Which 

Theoretical or Review Articles Draw Their Citations (104) 
LC Main Class/Subclass 
Letters & Selected Class/ 
Broad Subclass Titles 

Description of Disciplines/Fields 
of Studies Based on LC Class/ 

Subclass Titles 
Human ecology. Anthropogeography 

Number of Citations 
from LC Class/ 

Subclass 
1 

GF—Human ecology. 
Anthropogeography 
GN—Anthropology (9) 

Anthropology. Ethnology. Social and 
cultural anthropology. Applied anthro-
pology 

6 

Anthropology. Ethnology. Social and 
cultural anthropology. Cultural traits, 
customs, and institutions. Economic 
organization. Economic anthropology 

1 

Anthropology. Ethnology. Social and 
cultural anthropology. Culture and 
cultural processes, including social 
change, structuralism, diffusion, etc. 
Philosophy 

1 

4 

B—Philosophy, Psychol-
ogy, Religion 
BD, BF, BL (8) 

Speculative Philosophy. Epistemology. 
Theory of knowledge 

1 

Psychology. Consciousness. Cognition 1 
Psychology. Psychoanalysis 1 
Religion 
Mathematics. Instruments and 
machines. Electronic computers. Com-
puter science 

1 
2 

QA—Mathematics 
SB—Plant culture 
T—Technology (General) 
TL—Motor vehicles. 
Aeronautics. Astronautics 
TX—Home economics 
UF—Artillery (8) 

Agriculture. Plant culture. Parks and 
public reservations. Including theory, 
management, history 

1 

Technology (General). 1 
Motor vehicles. Aeronautics. Astro-
nautics. Aeronautics. Aeronautical 
engineering 

1 

Home economics. Hospitality industry. 
Hotels, clubs, restaurants, etc. Food 
service 

2 

Military Science. Artillery. Ordnance 
material (Ordnance proper) 
Fine Arts. Visual arts. History 

1 

2 

N—Visual arts 
PN—Literature (General) 
(4) 

Language and Literature. Literature. 
Drama. Broadcasting. Television 
broadcasts 

1 

Language and Literature. Literature. 
Literary history. Modern 

1 



      

 

 

      

    
     

      

   
    

    

    

   
     

   
     

    

    
   

      

   
    

    
    

      
     

     

     

    

    
     

      

 

    
     

       

    
      

      
 

     
     

    

    

    

     

      
     

      
     

   

Improving Collection Development and Reference Services 233 

Feeling. Emotion.” This is linked to a 
citation from a book entitled The Nature 
of Prejudice by Gordon Allport, which in 
turn is linked to an article by Abraham 
Pizam, Natan Uriely, and Arie Reichel.41 
Pizam et al. use Allport, among others, to 
talk about the degree to which long-term 
working tourists on an Israeli kibbutz ad-
here to the “contact model” of the Social 
Psychology of Intergroup Conflict theory, 
which states that “intergroup contact will 
lead to change in mutual a itudes and 
relations of the interacting members …, 
enhancing understanding and acceptance 
among the interaction group members, 
and consequently reduc[ing] intergroup 
prejudice, conflict, and tension.”42 The 
librarian would thus become aware that 
some tourism researchers are heavily 
involved in viewing tourist–host interac-
tions from psychological perspectives. 
The same librarian may become intrigued 
with how LC class KZ (Law of Nations), 
which is linked to a citation from James 
Hannon’s Ph.D. dissertation (classified 
as “International Law and other disci-
plines”) contained in an article by Nancy 
Gard McGehee, was used.43 McGehee, 
a sociologist by training, was interested 
in understanding how insights from 
self-efficacy, resource mobilization, and 
network analysis theories could be used 
to explain the way in which participa-
tion in environmental tourism activities 
led to greater participation in large-scale 
social movements. She thus relied heav-
ily on Hannon’s work about the nature 
of the “commitments, affiliations, and 
subjective identities” that led individuals 
to join international peace movements 
protesting what they considered to be im-
perialist foreign policies and laws.44 A er 
examining the use made of this citation, 
the librarian knows that some tourism 
scholars see tourist activities, especially 
those that create powerful network ties, 
as good predictors of future political and 

social activism—a phenomenon that can 
be validated by examining why individu-
als became members of political parties, 
social movements, and national protest 
groups. 

With regard to qualitatively based 
research articles (table 10), a librarian 
might become interested in LC class HT 
(Communities. Classes. Races), which is 
linked to Louis Dumont’s book Homo Hi-
erarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implica-
tions, which in turn is linked to an article 
by Sharon J. Hepburn.45 Hepburn, using 
theories from Ludwig Wi genstein and 
Peter Winch stating that any “action (as 
meaningful behavior) must be interpreted 
and understood in the terms through 
which the actor conceives of it,”46 has sug-
gested, through her reading of Dumont 
and others, that Nepalis comprehend 
tourists through a perspective of caste and 
ethnicity, differentiating among them on 
the basis of “essential qualities” and char-
acteristics.47 Hepburn’s use of Dumont’s 
classic work thus alerts librarians that 
sociological insights of the kind provided 
by Winch and Dumont are relevant for 
tourism researchers, especially those who 
want to see tourism not from the Western 
gaze but, rather, from the perspective of 
“host gaze”—“the person whose labor 
has become a spectacle.”48 

Alternatively, a librarian might want 
to know about the use made of LC class 
E (History of America), linked to a book 
chapter by Jean Barman, Yvonne Hebert, 
and Don McCaskill (classified in “Indians 
of North America”), which was cited by 
Yiping Li.49 Li, talking about the chal-
lenges faced by a Saskatchewan (Canada) 
heritage park, placed tourism marketing 
issues within the context of the history 
of native education. Natives who were 
brought up in an “institutionalized Eu-
ropean school system” and natives who 
were brought up with a more traditional 
ceremony-based teaching approach are 

http:acteristics.47
http:Hepburn.45
http:Reichel.41


 

    
     

       

    
    

     

    

      
     

    

   
      

 
     
     

      

     

   
 

    
      

 
    

     

    

   

     

    

        

 
   

     

     
       

     

    

    
   

    
       

     
    

        

    
      

     
     
      

234 College & Research Libraries 

two very distinct groups of people with 
two worldviews. 50 Using historical 
sources such as Barman, Hebert, and 
McCaskill, Yi alerts us to the fact that 
tourism a ractions are o en the sites of 
ideologically based cultural clashes that 
have significant implications for their 
future development and viability. This 
example tells the librarian that tourism 
research frequently benefits from an ex-
amination of sociocultural and historical 
contexts: how has a particular historical 
factor shaped a current tourism-based 
phenomenon? 

Finally, glancing at the citations used in 
theoretical and review research (table 11), 
a librarian might look more closely at LC 
class GN (Anthropology), focusing, for 
example, on the items classified in “Eth-
nology.” One of these is a citation from 
Margery Wolf’s book A Thrice Told Tale: 
Feminism, Postmodernism and Ethnographic 
Responsibility, which is linked to an article 
by Tazim Jamal and Keith Hollinshead.51 
Here, the librarian would learn much 
about why tourism research should focus 
on “the total context rather than on the 
forms of tourism or the individual tourist 
[because] in the context may be found in-
equities of wealth and power that invoke 
transformations of the native self and 
identity, as the collective history of those 
upon whom the visually oriented tourist 
gaze befalls metamorphoses ambigu-
ously.”52 As support for their argument, 
Jamal and Holinshead turn to Wolf, who 
warns “feminist anthropologists [to] not 
become distracted by the engagement of 
many postmodernist observers with form 
to the extent of neglecting the political 
agenda of the topic.”53 

Why is such knowledge important 
for librarians? As Lynn Westbrook has 
observed in her study of the information 
needs of women’s studies researchers—by 
definition a highly interdisciplinary and 
multidisciplinary group of individu-

May 2004 

als—such scholars say that, in the early 
stages of their work, “concrete support 
in exploring the issue at hand would be 
most helpful.”54 More specifically, they 
assert that “I need a librarian to ask ques-
tions to get me to see my research focus 
in a different light” or a librarian who can 
help find “[a] way to conceptualize my 
problem … talking through the idea and 
ge ing her response and knowledge.”55 
Summarizing her findings, Westbrook 
remarks that “librarians who are able to 
partner with, rather than serve, faculty 
are in a stronger position to support re-
search.”56 Urging librarians not only to 
take the time to find about the various 
individual research agendas of interdis-
ciplinary faculty members, but also about 
the wide range of theories used by them, 
she suggests that reference questions 
not be approached as discrete one-time 
events. Rather, the librarian who is com-
mi ed to providing excellent reference 
service to interdisciplinary researchers 
should know how to make connections 
from a single reference question to larger 
“issues pertinent to the research agenda” 
of that particular scholar. 

In many ways, these are imposing and 
daunting demands to place on librarians. 
Yet, for many interdisciplinary scholars 
faced with navigating numerous fields 
and subfields in which they may not have 
received formal training, a librarian who 
can provide insight and knowledge about 
the interconnections between and among 
disciplines and fields of study can be a 
crucial ally. One way that librarians can 
become such an ally is to make a rigorous 
study of the citation characteristics of an 
interdisciplinary field such as tourism 
studies, or any other field, because the 
method described here is generalizable. 
An extensive analysis of citation pat-
terns along the lines discussed above 
draws a detailed intellectual map of a 
field—a map that provides key informa-

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Improving Collection Development and Reference Services 235 

tion, through LC classification schedules, 
about the diverse range of subject areas 
used by interdisciplinary scholars in 
their research work. It allows librarians 
to see the relationship of certain LC 
classes and subclasses (and therefore 
various disciplines and fields of study) 
to broad types of research methodolo-
gies. Finally, it allows librarians to make 
a detailed examination about the way in 
which individual citations from selected 
disciplines function in the context of an 
individual research article, something 
that can make a librarian into an astute 
research associate for faculty members 
rather than just a finder of isolated bits of 
information. In sum, these various kinds 
of knowledge, gained through analysis of 
citation pa erns, can become the founda-
tion for offering the type of partnership-
based library service, whether in the area 
of collection development or reference 
service, that interdisciplinary scholars 
increasingly demand. 

In theoretical terms, analysis of citation 
characteristics can help librarians cope 
with information sca er by concretely 
identifying the obscure places where 
needed information is dispersed. As more 
and more disciplines move toward inter-
disciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, the 
problems associated with information 
sca er will only increase. Librarians who 
make an analysis of the citation character-
istics of a field in the way described here 
can ensure that they are ready to face the 
challenges of information sca er by being 
more confident in their knowledge about 
the intellectual structure of interdisciplin-
ary and multidisciplinary fields. They 
will not only be more confident that their 
library’s collection is well stocked with 
the titles needed by a specific interdisci-
plinary scholar, but they also will be able 
to ask the types of questions that cause 
scholars to conceptualize issues in new 
ways or to see their “research focus in a 

different light.”57 Certainly, the method 
outlined here represents a considerable 
amount of detailed work and analysis. 
The question of practicality naturally 
arises: who has the time, or the inspira-
tion, to undertake such a task?58 This is 
the wrong question to ask. Instead of 
seeing this method as an onerous burden, 
it should be regarded as a key element of 
a re-intellectualized approach to librari-
anship—an approach that emphasizes 
subject-specific knowledge that can be of 
lasting value rather than increasingly de-
intermediated process-based skills. 

Conclusion 
As Katherine Corby points out, librar-
ians have often analyzed citations in 
order to generate journal core lists.59 
A er surveying a number of such stud-
ies, she concludes that results have been 
mixed. Faculty members, especially in 
interdisciplinary fields such as women’s 
studies, have very different ideas about 
the journals that are most useful to them. 
When Thura Mack compiled the answers 
of twenty-five women’s studies professors 
who were asked to list the six journals 
most useful to them in their work, she 
discovered that just under 85 percent 
of the journals were named only once.60 
The findings of Kathleen E. Joswick and 
Jeanne Koekkoek Stierman, as well as 
Larry Hardesty and Gail Oltmanns, are 
also revealing.61,62 After analyzing the 
citations in undergraduate student term 
papers, both sets of scholars found that 
undergraduates overwhelmingly used 
only journals available at their institu-
tional libraries. This phenomenon, as 
Corby observes, may be viewed as “the 
‘self-fulfulling prophecy’ syndrome”: 
librarians who rely on core journal lists 
for selection and deselection purposes 
contribute to a situation where those core 
journals are the only ones being used.63 
On the one hand, faculty cannot agree 

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236 College & Research Libraries 

which journals are core journals. On the 
other hand, librarians nevertheless use a 
variety of methods (e.g., ISI Journal Cita-
tion Reports) to identify some journals as 
core, with the understanding that noncore 
items will be cancelled or not purchased. 
Undergraduates then rely almost ex-
clusively on the core items in their term 
papers and assignments, whether or not 
all faculty members consider them to be 
core. As John M. Cullars pointed out in a 
discussion of the citation characteristics 
of English-language philosophy mono-
graphs, “extreme sca er of serial citations 
in philosophy strongly suggests that no 
core collection of journals can adequately 
serve user needs.”64 

The construction of core journal lists 
(or core book lists) in various fields 
is thus problematic. To be sure, it is a 
necessary first step, one that can iden-
tify lacunae in library holdings.65 But, 
as described above, the universities that 
employ tourism scholars who frequently 
publish in tourism research journals 
own a very large proportion of the core 
tourism research literature identified in 
table 4. Thus, they already do a good 
job of collecting the core sources in the 
interdisciplinary field of tourism studies. 
But collecting core materials in a field is 
not the same as having librarians who 
can work in partnership with scholars to 
conceptualize issues in new ways or to see 
their “research focus in a different light.” 
Something more is needed. 

Analyzing the citation characteristics 
of a particular field with regard to source 
type, languages, and dates of cited items 
is a good next step: a great deal of extra 
information is thereby provided. Cullars 
has been adept at such research, examin-
ing citation pa erns of Italian and Spanish 
literary monographs, French and German 
literary monographs, French and German 
fine arts monographs, and philosophy 
monographs, among others.6 6 – 6 9 His 

May 2004 

analysis of philosophy monographs is 
perhaps the most valuable of these efforts 
as it identifies, in broad terms, the disci-
plines outside philosophy that are cited in 
philosophy monographs70 and concludes 
by declaring that “more a ention might 
profitably be paid to the frequently cited 
disciplines outside of philosophy.”71 In 
addition, he identified various schools of 
philosophy and hinted that citation pat-
terns may differ in philosophical works 
written by female scholars, especially 
those working in feminist philosophy.72 
In the end, however, such research tends 
to become overly mechanical. Something 
still more is needed. 

Stephen E. Wiberley Jr., in an analysis 
of fi y-four literary studies and art mono-
graphs, identifies five types of scholarship 
present in these two humanities fields— 
descriptions of primary sources, editing 
of primary sources, historical studies, 
criticism, and theory—and argues that 
each of these five types conforms broadly 
to a specific bibliometric model.73 When 
that bibliometric model has been defined 
and when a librarian can associate a 
scholar with a particular model, the li-
brarian can be er understand—and thus 
be er help—that scholar. For example, a 
librarian will know that “an interpretative 
literary scholar” will not only use archives 
and manuscripts but will “also use many 
sources that class outside traditional lit-
erature (nontheoretical LC classification 
PA-PZ), an unusually large proportion 
of sources that class in C-F, relatively 
few recent sources, and relatively li le 
theory.”74 Although Wiberley’s study has 
an astounding number of methodologi-
cal flaws that undermine his conclusions 
about arts and literary studies scholar-
ship, his general observation that the 
diverse subareas, specialties, and sub-
types of various academic fields may be 
correlated with distinct citation pa erns 
is a sound one. 

http:model.73
http:philosophy.72
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Improving Collection Development and Reference Services 237 

Working independently of, and with 
no knowledge of, Wiberley’s work, the 
authors of this study examined the in-
terdisciplinary social sciences field of 
tourism studies from a perspective simi-
lar to his, hypothesizing that the type of 
methodological approach used by tourism 
scholars—whether quantitative, qualita-
tive, or theoretical/review—would affect 
the type of LC class areas/LC disciplinary 
areas cited in published articles using that 
approach. As shown in table 8, this hypoth-
esis was justified: qualitatively based and 
theoretical/review-based tourism articles 
have a substantially larger percentage of 
citations from LC fields external to tourism 
itself than do quantitatively based articles, 
with articles employing a mix of qualita-
tive and quantitative methods falling 
somewhere between the two. Moreover, 
different methodological approaches give 
rise to different emphases in the LC ranges 
of citations within articles employing 
those approaches. (See examples in tables 
9 through 11.) Librarians who can identify 
the methodological approach used by a 
specific tourism studies scholar can thus 
gain additional insight about what LC 
subject areas that scholar would typically 
cite in her or his research. As has also been 
demonstrated above, an added benefit of 
correlating LC classes and subclasses with 
methodological approaches is that librari-
ans can make a detailed examination about 
the way in which individual citations 
from selected LC classes and subclasses 
function in the context of an individual 
research article. In this way, librarians can 
truly become research partners capable of 
generating fresh research approaches that 
may be of service to scholars in an inter-
disciplinary field. The notion that “there is 
li le justification for librarians to tell critics 
or theorists what they should read”75 may 
be an outdated one, especially given the 
comments of women’s studies scholars 
quoted by Westbrook. 

Using the interdisciplinary field of 
tourism studies as an example, this article 
has outlined a comprehensive approach 
to how librarians can help interdisciplin-
ary scholars in their research work. The 
approach consists of two components: 
a traditional analysis of citation charac-
teristics that generates core journal lists 
and core book lists as well as information 
about the source types and chronological 
periods of citations; and a detailed analy-
sis of citations by LC classification so as 
to get a be er sense of the information 
sca er typically associated with an inter-
disciplinary field and to gain insight into 
how interdisciplinary scholars do their 
intellectual work. This approach can be 
viewed as a tool that is capable of help-
ing collection development and reference 
librarians gain understanding about the 
subject breadth of an interdisciplinary 
field and provide “information leeway” 
for interdisciplinary scholars. Cynthia 
Dobson, Jeffrey D. Kushkowski, and 
Kristin H. Gerhard noted that “collection 
evaluation should begin by building an 
information model of the interdisciplin-
ary area that reflects both the field itself 
and the unique qualities of a particular 
program.”76 A detailed breakdown of 
the LC classes and subclasses cited by a 
group of interdisciplinary scholars can 
contribute to the development of such an 
information model. This knowledge then 
can be used to create tools that function 
as the kind of “information leeway” that 
interdisciplinary scholars crave—tools 
that such scholars say should provide 
an “applicable ‘sma ering’ of relevant 
material” and “a small percentage, some 
suitable subset of research in subject ar-
eas related to my work.”77 For instance, 
as Joan B. Fiscella stated, despite the 
ready availability of electronic catalogs 
and indexes, bibliographies covering 
interdisciplinary areas can be invaluable 
for individual scholars who identify “a 

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238 College & Research Libraries May 2004 

potentially useful theory or framework 
outside [their] specialization.”78 As well, 
an analysis of this kind would allow 
librarians to participate as full members 
of interdisciplinary research teams, as 
envisioned, for example, by Jack T. Smith 
Jr..79 In sum, detailed analysis of citation 
characteristics from the perspective of LC 

classes and subclasses can help librarians 
build up a body of knowledge about, and 
expertise in, a given interdisciplinary 
field or area, allowing them to become 
the type of valued intermediaries that 
scholars look for when they are probing 
and exploring unfamiliar academic sub-
jects and areas. 

Notes 

1. Don Spanner, “Border Crossings: Understanding the Cultural and Informational Dilemmas 
of Interdisciplinary Scholars,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 27 (Sept. 2001): 352–60. 

2. Carole L. Palmer and Laura J. Neumann, “The Information Work of Interdisciplinary 
Humanities Scholars: Exploration and Translation,” Library Quarterly 72 (Jan. 2002): 99. 

3. Palmer, “Structures and Strategies of Interdisciplinary Science,” Journal of the American 
Society for Information Science 50 (1999): 252. 

4. Palmer and Neumann, “The Information Work of Interdisciplinary Humanities Scholars,” 
99, 102, 103. 

5. Palmer, “Structures and Strategies,” 251. 
6. Susan E. Searing, “Meeting the Information Needs of Interdisciplinary Scholars: Issues 

for Administrators of Large University Libraries,” Library Trends 45 (fall 1996): 315–42. See also 
Michael F. Winter, “Specialization, Territoriality, and Jurisdiction: Librarianship and the Political 
Economy of Knowledge,” Library Trends 45 (fall 1996): 343–63. 

7. Ibid., 251. 
8. Lynn Westbrook, “Information Needs and Experiences of Scholars in Women’s Studies: 

Problems and Solutions,” College & Research Libraries 64 (May 2003): 197. 
9. Ibid., 203. 

10. Ibid., 203. 
11. Charlo e M. Echtner and Tazim B. Jamal, “The Disciplinary Dilemma of Tourism Studies,” 

Annals of Tourism Research 24 (1997): 868. 
12. Jafar Jafari, “Retracing and Mapping Tourism’s Landscape of Knowledge.” Available online 

at h p://www.fas.harvard.edu/~drclas/publications/revista/Tourism/jafari.html [Accessed 9 July 
2003]. 

13. ———, “Research and Scholarship: The Basis of Tourism Education,” Journal of Tourism 
Studies 1 (1990): 33–41. 

14. Nelson H. H. Garburn and Jafar Jafari, “Introduction: Tourism Social Science,” Annals of 
Tourism Research 18 (1991): 7–8. 

15. See the special issue of Annals of Tourism Research 18 (1991): 1–169, which contains ten 
essays that describe how tourism intersects with ten different fields to form a multidisciplinary 
social science. 

16. The debate is conveniently summarized in Echtner and Jamal, “The Disciplinary Dilemma 
of Tourism Studies,” 868–83. See also John Tribe, “The Indiscipline of Tourism,” Annals of Tourism 
Research 24 (1997): 638–57. 

17. See, for example, Roger W. Riley and Lisa L. Love, “The State of Qualitative Tourism 
Research,” Annals of Tourism Research 27 (2000): 164–87. 

18. See, for example, R. W. Carter, G. S. Baxter, and M. Hockings, “Resource Management in 
Tourism Research: A New Direction?” Journal of Sustainable Tourism 4 (2001): 265–80. 

19. See, for example, Kristin Gerhard, Mila Su, and Charlo e Rubens, “An Empirical Exami-
nation of Subject Headings for Women’s Studies Core Materials,” College & Research Libraries 59 
(Mar. 1998): 130–38; Hur-Li Lee, “Collection Development as a Social Process,” Journal of Academic 
Librarianship 29 (Jan. 2003): 23–31; Westbrook, “Information Access Issues for Interdisciplinary 
Scholars: Results of a Delphi Study on Women’s Studies Research,” Journal of Academic Librarian-
ship 23 (May 1997): 211–16. 

20. See The ISI Database: The Journal Selection Process. Available online at h p://www.isinet. 
com/isi/hot/essays/selectionofmaterialforcoverage/199701.html [Accessed 21 June 2003]. 

21. Tourism scholarship itself agrees that Annals of Tourism Research and Tourism Management 
are two of its central journals, ranking them number one and number three, respectively. Journal 
of Travel Research (JTR) is ranked number two but is not included in Journal of Citation Reports. See 
Richard M. Howey, Kathryn S. Savage, Marja J. Verbeeten, and Hubert B. Van Hoof, “Tourism and 



 

                

 

              

 

             

              

           

            

               

 
        

 
  

             

 
          

 

             

            

Improving Collection Development and Reference Services 239 

Hospitality Research Journals: Cross-citations among Research Communities,” Tourism Manage-
ment 20 (1999): 133–39; Pauline J. Sheldon, “Journal Usage in Tourism: Perceptions of Publishing 
Faculty,” Journal of Tourism Studies 1 (1990): 42–48. 

22. In the case of ATR, the authors examined the twelve issues comprising volumes 27 through 
29. In the case of TM, the authors examined the eighteen issues comprising volumes 21 through 
23. 

23. Country of origin of authors, as shown in author affiliations, is as follows for ATR: United 
States (61); Australia (35); United Kingdom (32); New Zealand (16); Israel (15); Canada (11); The 
Netherlands (10); Spain (8); Denmark (6); and Norway (5). For TM, country of origin of authors is 
as follows: United Kingdom (57); United States (53); Australia (40); New Zealand (20); Hong Kong 
(16); Taiwan (16); South Korea (15); Spain (12); Canada (10); Israel (9); Turkey (7); and Singapore 
(5). These numbers do not necessarily coincide with the number of authors for the articles in 
question because some authors have double affiliations, either within the same country or with 
two institutions in different countries. Double affiliations are counted twice. For example, if the 
author is affiliated with two different institutions in Taiwan, Taiwan is counted twice. These 
numbers are based on all 142 research articles in ATR and all 149 research articles in TM. 

24. This information was derived from the geographic keyword(s) assigned to ISI article re-
cords. If a geographic keyword was not assigned, the authors examined other parts of the record, 
and if necessary the whole article, to extract the required information. 

25. To determine broad research types, the abstract and methodology sections of each selected 
article were examined for specific details about the research methodology. If this proved insuffi-
cient, the entire text of the article was examined. Specific research methodologies were as follows: 
theoretical analysis/review; case study; content analysis; content analysis and secondary data 
analysis; content analysis, ecological traverse, interview, and observations; data modeling; data 
modeling and secondary data analysis; ethnography; secondary data analysis; survey; survey and 
interview; survey and secondary data analysis; survey, interview, and secondary data analysis; 
survey, interview, and observations; survey, interview, and focus groups; survey and focus groups; 
interview; interview, focus groups, and grounded theory; interview, field notes, documents, and 
case study. These specific methodologies were then grouped into four broad research types. 

26. In the course of the sampling process, a number of problems with ISI indexing were 
identified. For example, some citations listed by ISI were not present in the original article; if 
the erroneous citation happened to be sampled, it was replaced with the next citation found in 
the reference list of the original article. In other instances, the author’s last name was provided 
correctly by ISI, but the author’s initials and/or the source title was incorrect. In these cases, the 
authors chose the citation for the author with the same last name in the original article. The order 
of citations in ISI records does not necessarily correspond with the order of citations in full-text 
articles. 

27. Sample size was calculated using the Sample Size Calculator provided by Creative Re-
search Systems. Available online at h p://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm [Accessed 15 March 
2003]. 

28. Available online at h p://www.randomizer.org [Accessed 15 March 2003]. 
29. If necessary bibliographic information could not first be found in OCLC, other catalogs, 

including those of the Library of Congress and major North American universities, were searched 
in order to find the needed information. For very obscure items, classifications were assigned 
using LC schedules. 

30. Each citation was categorized as one of the fi een following types of sources: book; edited 
book; conference proceedings (if published or unpublished conference proceedings were referred 
to as a whole); Ph.D. dissertation; master’s thesis; report/statistics (for government publications 
and publications issued by public/private organizations that focused specifically on statistics, 
project reports, development plans, statistical summaries, rules and regulations, censuses, sta-
tistical abstracts, etc.); book chapter; conference paper (if a specific conference paper, whether 
published or unpublished, was referred to); electronic resource; broadcast; academic/scholarly 
journal; trade publication; consumer magazine; newspaper; and newsle er. Types of periodical 
publications were determined based on classification provided in Ulrich’s Periodical Directory. 
Available online at h p://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/ [Accessed 15 January 2003]. 

31. One or two le ers designating either the main class or the first subclass (e.g., G, GV, HQ) 
of the LC classification were recorded for each item. For the most part, these classifications were 
available from OCLC records, but occasionally other major university catalogs were used to track 
down obscure items. 

32. These nine categories are: academic/scholarly journal; book and edited book; book chapter; 
report/statistics; consumer magazine/trade publication/newsle er; conference paper/conference 
proceedings; newspaper (print & online) and broadcast; Ph.D. dissertation/master’s thesis; and 
electronic resource. 

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240 College & Research Libraries May 2004 

33. Percentages for TM do not add to 100 because of rounding (99.9). 
34. Data are as follows: 1993 (43 citations); 1994 (40); 1995 (48); 1996 (36); 1997 (38); 1998 

(41). 
35. Full bibliographic information for the fourteen books is as follows: Valene L. Smith, Hosts 

and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Pr., 1989); Nelson H. 
H. Graburn, Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World (Philadelphia: Univ. 
of Pennsylvania Pr., 1977); Louis Turner and John Ash, The Golden Hordes: International Tourism 
and the Pleasure Periphery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975); Stephen Page and Donald Getz, 
The Business of Rural Tourism: International Perspectives (London: International Thomson Business 
Pr., 1997); Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand 
Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1994); Yvonna S. Lincoln and Egon G. Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry (Beverly Hills, 
Calif.: Sage, 1985); Philip Kotler and Gary Armstrong, Principles of Marketing (8th ed.) (Upper Saddle 
River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1999); Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class 
(Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Pr., 1999); Stephen L. J. Smith, Tourism Analysis: A Handbook 
(Harlow, Essex, England: Longman Scientific & Technical, 1995); James Gordon Nelson, R. But-
ler, and Geoffrey C. Wall, Tourism and Sustainable Development: Monitoring, Planning, Managing 
(Waterloo, Ont.: Univ. of Waterloo Department of Geography, 1993); Michel Picard and Robert 
Evere  Wood, Tourism, Ethnicity, and the State in Asian and Pacific Societies (Honolulu: Univ. of 
Hawai’i Pr., 1977); Robert Woodrow McIntosh, Charles R. Goeldner, and J. R. Brent Ritchie, Tourism: 
Principles, Practices, Philosophies (7th ed.) (New York: Wiley, 1995); Yiorgos Apostolopoulos, Stella 
Leivadi, and Andrew Yiannakis, The Sociology of Tourism: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations 
(New York: Routledge, 1996); J. R. Brent Ritchie and Charles R. Goeldner, Travel, Tourism, and 
Hospitality Research: A Handbook for Managers and Researchers (New York: Wiley, 1987). 

36. The names of these six universities are: Virginia Tech; Texas A&M; Northern Arizona Uni-
versity; University of Central Florida; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and University 
of Nevada at Las Vegas. 

37. Jafari, “Retracing and Mapping Tourism’s Landscape of Knowledge.” 
38. In table 5, all disciplines listed below the triple line are nontourism disciplines. There are 

273 citations from these disciplines, collectively representing 48.8 percent of citations. Percent-
ages in table 5 are based on a denominator of 559 (the total number of citations examined in the 
present study). The figures used in the sentence here are based on a denominator of 273. Not all 
disciplines listed in this sentence appear in tables 6 and 7 because tables 6 and 7 illustrate selected 
disciplines only. 

39. See, for example, Margaret Byrne Swain, Maryann Brent, and Veronica H. Long, “Annals 
and Tourism Evolving: Indexing 25 Years of Publication,” Annals of Tourism Research 25 (1998): 
991–1014; see also Jafar Jafari and Dean Aaser, “Tourism as the Subject of Doctoral Dissertations,” 
Annals of Tourism Research 15 (1988): 407–29. 

40. Richard M. Howey, Kathryn S. Savage, Marja J. Verbeeten, and Hubert B. Van Hoof, “Tour-
ism and Hospitality Research Journals: Cross-citations among Research Communities,” Tourism 
Management 20 (1999): 134. 

41. Abraham Pizam, Natan Uriely, and Arie Reichel, “The Intensity of Tourist–Host Social 
Relationship and Its Effects on Satisfaction and Change of A itudes: The Case of Working Tour-
ists in Israel,” Tourism Management 21 (2000): 395–406. 

42. Ibid., 398. 
43. Nancy Gard McGehee, “Alternative Tourism and Social Movements,” Annals of Tourism 

Research 29 (2002): 124–43. 
44. Ibid., 127. 
45. Sharon J. Hepburn, “Touristic Forms of Life in Nepal,” Annals of Tourism Research 29 (2002): 

611–30. 
46. Ibid., 614. 
47. Ibid., 627. 
48. Ibid., 615. 
49. Yiping Li, “Ethnic Tourism: A Canadian Experience,” Annals of Tourism Research 27 (2000): 

115–31. 
50. Ibid., 123. 
51 T. Jamal and K. Hollinshead, “Tourism and the Forbidden Zone: The Underserved Power 

of Qualitative Inquiry,” Tourism Management 22 (2001): 63–82. 
52. Ibid., 75. 
53. Ibid., 77. 
54. Westbrook, “Information Needs and Experiences of Scholars in Women’s Studies,” 197. 
55. Ibid., 203. 
56. Ibid., 205. 
57. Ibid., 203. 



 

 

            
             

             
 

  
 

 
          

  
 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
  

 
 
 

  

             

Improving Collection Development and Reference Services 241 

58. The authors thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing to their a ention the need to ad-
dress the issue of practicality. 

59. Katherine Corby, “Constructing Core Journal Lists: Mixing Science and Alchemy,” portal: 
Libraries and the Academy 3 (2003): 207–17. 

60. Thura Mack, “A Model Methodology for Selecting Women’s Studies Core Journals,” Library 
& Information Science Research 13 (1991): 131–45. Cited in Corby, “Constructing Core Journal Lists,” 
209. 

61. Kathleen E. Joswick and Jeanne Koekkoek Stierman, “The Core List Mirage: A Comparison 
of the Journals Frequently Consulted by Faculty and Students,” College & Research Libraries 58 
(Jan. 1997): 48–55. Cited in Corby, “Constructing Core Journal Lists,” 212. 

62. Larry Hardesty and Gail Oltmanns, “How Many Psychology Journals Are Enough? A 
Study of the Use of Psychology Journals by Undergraduates,” Serials Librarian 16, no. 1/2 (1989): 
133–53. Cited in Corby, “Constructing Core Journal Lists,” 212. 

63. Corby, “Constructing Core Journal Lists,” 212. 
64. John M. Cullars, “Citation Characteristics of English-Language Monographs in Philosophy,” 

Library & Information Science Research 20 (1998): 41–68. 
65. See, for example, Jeffrey D. Kushkowski, Kristin H. Gerhard, and Cynthia Dobson, “A 

Method for Building Core Journal Lists in Interdisciplinary Areas,” Journal of Documentation 54 
(Sept. 1998): 477–88. See also Philip M. Davis, “Where to Spend Our E-journal Money? Defining a 
University Library’s Core Collection through Citation Analysis,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 
2 (2002): 155–66. 

66. Cullars, “Citation Characteristics of Italian and Spanish Literary Monographs,” Library 
Quarterly 60 (Oct. 1990): 337–56. 

67. ———, “Citation Characteristics of French and German Literary Monographs,” Library 
Quarterly 59 (Oct. 1989): 305–25. 

68. ———, “Citation Characteristics of French and German Fine Arts Monographs,” Library 
Quarterly 66 (Apr. 1996): 138–60. 

69. ———, “Citation Characteristics of English-Language Monographs in Philosophy.” 
70. Ibid., 51. 
71. Ibid., 65. 
72. Ibid., 58–60, 65. 
73. Stephen E. Wiberley Jr., “A Methodological Approach to Developing Bibliometric Models 

of Types of Humanities Scholarship,” Library Quarterly 73 (Apr. 2003): 121–59. 
74. Ibid., 153. 
75. Ibid., 152. 
76. Dobson, Kushkowski, and Gerhard, “Collection Evaluation for Interdisciplinary Fields,” 

279–84. 
77. Palmer, “Structures and Strategies of Interdisciplinary Science,” 251–52. 
78. Joan B. Fiscella, “Bibliography as an Interdisciplinary Information Service,” Library Trends 

45 (fall 1996): 293. 
79. Jack T. Smith Jr., “Meta-Analysis: The Librarian as Member of an Interdisciplinary Research 

Team,” Library Trends 45 (fall 1996): 265–79.