A social network perspective of tourism research collaborations

The structure and the sociology of scientific collaborations are receiving increasing interest, especially in a world characterized by complex problems, dynamic growth of knowledge, and specialized areas of expertise. The primary objective of this study was to explore the patterns of collaborations in tourism research community. To this end, the authors apply social network analysis on co-authorship data obtained from top three tourism journals. The analysis revealed that even though the tourism researcher network is large and complex, it is dispersed in the form of several core groups of researchers who sometimes act as nodes in the network. Further, significant network characteristics, and the sociology behind their significance are presented and discussed.