Analysis of Tourism Research Papers in Iran

This applied library study sought to examine five Iranian research journals in the field of tourism from a methodological perspective. The population of the study comprised of all articles published from 2016 to 2020 in the aforementioned journals, including the Journal of Tourism and Development, Social Studies of Tourism Journal, Tourism planning and Development journal, Urban Tourism journal, and Tourism Management journal. No sampling was utilized, and all the components of the study's population were examined via the census. Accordingly, some 814 articles were examined in terms of the number of articles published per year, the research approach, the data analysis method, the data collection tools, data collection method, research area, the number of authors per article, the geographical areas studied, and the corresponding author's organizational affiliation and major. The findings showed that the largest number of published articles within the recent five editions belonged to the Journal of Tourism and Development and that most of the articles were focused on Iran's northern and central provinces. It was also found that researchers in the fields of geography and urban planning had great contributions to the articles published on the subject of tourism. Moreover, in terms of the corresponding author's affiliation, the greatest number of published articles belonged to Allameh Tabatabai University and Tehran University, respectively. Also, most of the published articles were descriptive-applied in terms of purpose and quantitative in terms of research method (structural equations), with 61% of them using a questionnaire to collect their required data.