Special issue: Journal impact factors

Abstract

As many readers will be aware, Tourism Management has not hosted Special Issues since 2000 when it ran a feature on the Competitive Destination and the recent Virtual Special Issue that collated the Progress in Tourism Management: The first six years 2007-2013 review papers. Our decision to suspend Special Issues reflects the huge growth in submission and the volume of papers the Journal now publishes. In 1996 the journal was publishing around 60 papers a year from about 250 to 300 submissions. In 2014 this will have grown to over 900 submissions and approximately 130 papers published with acceptance rates of around 15–18%. This exponential growth in the journal's popularity means that space for Special Issues has been at a premium while the prime consideration has been the timely publication of cutting edge scholarly papers. Accompanying these changes has been a rise in the interdisciplinary content of much of the work now being published in the journal. An important ethos of the journal which the Editors espouse is that Tourism Management remains a broad-based journal that embraces that interdisciplinarity and encourages scholarly debate on papers that occurs from time to time in Rejoinders we publish while additionally encouraging the publication of novel and controversial topics.