Are 10,752 journal articles per year too many?

Are 10,752 journal articles per year too many? (YouTube, 1m 50s)

In 2021, 10,752 refereed tourism, hospitality and event articles appeared in 272 journals. The number was derived by analysing a list of relevant journals developed by one of the authors. Each journal’s website was validated and a manual count of the number of papers published in 2021 was tallied. This process was assisted by the use of the Scopus data base, plus colleagues fluent in Chinese, Korean and Russian. Google.Translate was used to access journals in other languages.

A few key observations emerge.

1. Although English language papers dominate (8,432 articles), many non-English journals exist, publishing, among others, in Portuguese (474 articles), Korean (465), Chinese (366), Spanish (192), Russian (172) and Turkish (144).
2. Many tourism journals appear to be struggling. Of the 304 journals that published in whole or in part in English between 1946 and 2021, more than 100 appear to be defunct, having neither active websites nor showing publications for 2021. Indeed, the number of potentially defunct journals is growing: 42 journals have not updated their websites since either 2017 (seven titles), 2018 (14 titles), 2019 (11 titles) or 2020 (10 titles).
3. Many English language journals appear to have difficulty attracting submissions: 60 journals published 10 or fewer papers last year and of these, 22 journals published five or less.
4. Some journals that appear to have difficulties attracting submission report acceptance rates of over 70%.
5. Of the 198 journals that published in English, in whole or in part, in 2021, 18 appear on predatory journals lists.

These observations lead to several questions:

Do we have too many tourism journals? In normal marketplaces, demand determines firm survival. But publishing is not a normal market because (1) demand comes not only from subscribers but also from academics under publication pressure, (2) subscribers purchase journal packages rather than individual journals, and (3) editors and reviewers typically donate their time, reducing the costs that need to be recovered to make a journal financially viable.

Are we publishing too many articles? Assuming each journal article makes a significant contribution, how many significant contributions could one expect would be generated in a year? How many of the 10,752 articles present a new idea, advance knowledge, or fill a genuine research gap? How many inspire us?

Why are we publishing so many articles? Have academics – who have, to their own detriment, wholeheartedly embraced numeric key performance indicators such as the h-index – changed their position on what the purpose of an article is? Traditionally a vehicle to communicate study results, is it now a vehicle to survive the next annual performance review?

What are the consequences for knowledge development? Too many journals and too many articles are not a problem per se. Problems arise, however, if anything is publishable regardless of its quality. Oosterhaven (2015) demonstrated this point mathematically, concluding that “all manuscripts submitted to any journal will ultimately be published, either by the first journal or by one of the following journals to which a manuscript is resubmitted. This suggests that low quality manuscripts may also be published, which further suggests that there may be too many journals” (Oosterhaven 2015:261). If anything is publishable, will we see an erosion in quality standards? Will we be satisfied increasingly with publishing anything even of dubious quality and stop striving to produce work that can change the world  and/or advance our field? What will the next generation of tourism researchers be driven by? How can we ensure they will focus their efforts on making important new discoveries and developing solutions for today’s and tomorrow’s key challenges?

The questions above are not unique to tourism. Across all disciplines, over 30,000 English language journals exist, which Altbach and de Wit (2018) suggest is too many. Commentaries published in other areas such as oncology (Bates 2017), medical physics (Caon 2015) and management (Kai & Thomas 2020) argue that too many journals are publishing too many papers of questionable quality. Indeed, more than 30 years ago, Hargens (1991) asked similar questions about sociology journals.

What to do? It is impossible to keep up with the literature if 8,432 papers are published in English annually, and another 2,300 in other languages. The large quantity of published papers makes it increasingly difficult to find the insightful gems among them. Even if one percent of what is published is truly innovative, then we generate 100 such papers annually. But where are they? How do we find them? They get lost in the avalanche of publications of marginal value.

Pressure to publish is at an all-time high and shows no signs of slowing as institutions seeking to improve their world rankings impose a publish-or-perish culture on their staff. Have we individually and collectively created a research culture driven by the ‘publon’ – the “minimum amount of information that can generate a publication in a peer-reviewed journal” (Urban Dictionary, n.d.)? Is the only solution now individual rebellion – the refusal to accept institutional pressures and focus on producing high-quality contributions to knowledge? How many academics, especially young academics without job security, can afford the luxury of such rebellion?

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the assistance Dr Ting Ting Liu, Dr Moon Oh and Dr Denis Tolkach. Bob McKercher undertook the empirical analysis underlying this Viewpoint.

References

Altbach, P. G. & de Wit, H. (2018). Too much academic research is being published. International Higher Education, (96), 2–3. https://doi.org/10.6017/ihe.2019.96.10767

Caon, M. (2016). There are too many medical physics journals! Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine, 39, 813–816. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13246-016-0485-3

Hargens, L. (1991). Impressions and misimpressions about sociology journals. Contemporary Sociology, 20(3), 343–349.

Kai, P. & Thomas, H. (2020). The triumph of nonsense in management studies: A commentary. Academy of Management Learning & Education. 19(2).  236-239.

Oosterhaven, J. (2015). Too many journals? Towards a theory of repeated rejections and ultimate acceptance. Scientometrics, 103, 261–265.

Urban Dictionary (n.d.) publon, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=publon, last accessed 11.1.2022.