Triangulation in tourism research: A bibliometric study of top three tourism journals

• Tourism papers make up a small proportion of papers in the SSCI and SCI.
• Only 29.7% of research papers appear to have resorted to data triangulation.
• Tourism Management publishes more research papers than the two other top journals.
• The study has implications for practitioners and academics, as authors/referees.
• It has implications for editors, publishers, funding bodies and policy makers too.

This bibliometric study explores the extent of the use of triangulation as a research method/strategy in research papers published in top three tourism journals (namely Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management and Journal of Travel Research) over a period of ten years between 2003 and 2012. The findings reveal that in large proportion of the research papers (70.3%) published in the top three journals the authors have not resorted to triangulation and used only one method of data collection. The findings have implications not only for industry practitioners and academics (both as authors and referees) but also for a wide variety of other stakeholders such as journal editors, publishers, research funding bodies and public policy makers.