revealed that majority of information technology publications were about general business
applications and the growth rate of articles on networking was the highest during that period.
Applying the same methodology, Leung and Law (2007) further examined published IT
papers in three leading tourism journals: Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Travel Research,
and Tourism Management. The study revealed that the most widely published IT-related stream
was networking, with the highest growth rate during the ten-year period. IT papers in leading
tourism and hospitality journals can provide information about the state of eTourism
knowledge. As such, a comprehensive examination of the nature and evaluation of eTourism
research can provide verifiable and grounded conclusions. In their recently conducted study,
Buhalis and Law (2008) looked at the progress in information technology and tourism
management. Their analysis covered three main themes, namely consumer and demand
dimensions, technological innovations, and industry and business functions.
As previously stated, both of conference papers and research journals are the essential
communication channels for researchers. However, a strong and mounting interest has been
given to publications in research journals; whereas those presented and published in
conference proceedings have largely been overlooked. To fill this research void, this study
purposes to analyze the most influential articles published in the ENTER conference
proceedings during the period of 1994 to 2012. Started in 1994, the annual ENTER
conference has grown and established as the internationally leading conference in eTourism.
The conference proceedings certainly reflect the richness and diversity of ICTs application in
tourism and hospitality, representing a valuable addition to the existing body of eTourism
research. To present the state of the most influential eTourism research in a comprehensive
way, this study examined these articles from the perspectives of number of citations per year,
research topic, data nature, and data analysis method.
RESEARCH METHODS
The ENTER conference papers’ citation data were collected on July 31, 2012 using
Harzing’s Publish or Perish (POP) software (Harzing, 2012). This software consolidated the
results from Google Scholar. By using the journal search with the journal title “information
and communication technologies in tourism“, a total of 738 papers were retrieved. These
papers were published between 1994 and 2012, which covered the entire collection of
ENTER proceedings. The objective of this study was to examine the characteristics of the
top cited ENTER papers, which includes research topics, data collection methods and data
analysis methods. The top 100 ENTER conference papers were extracted from the result list
generated by POP. To provide a fair view of the citation count among papers with different
publication date, number of citations per year was used instead of the total number of
citations. As there were some papers sharing the same citations per year, the cut-off point of
1.4 citations per year was selected and a total of 97 conference papers were included for
further data analysis.
Details with the 97 paper were extracted from POP and copied to an Excel worksheet.
Each conference paper was then carefully reviewed by the authors. As there were no
keywords provided for the papers that were published 2001, only 87 papers’ keywords were
captured for keyword analysis. The keywords were grouped according to its characteristics
and research objective. In case the keywords was a general terminology such as
“interoperability“, as the paper was related to web issue, therefore this keyword fall belongs
to “web”. To other aspects, all authors read through the article and identified the data nature
(i.e., quantitative, qualitative, hybrid) and data analysis methods. All results were then cross-
compared to ensure the inter-rater reliability.
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
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