African tourism scholarship: Trends in academic journal publishing

Abstract

Against the background of the growth of tourism as a sector of importance for African economies this paper reflects on an issue of growing controversy in tourism scholarship, namely the patterns of production of tourism research and of publishing in academic journals. Earlier work documented that African scholarship on tourism was dominated by rural-focussed investigations around nature tourism and ecotourism with the leading themes being those of destination development, policy and planning, and visitor studies. Patterns of journal publishing for African tourism research are mainly taking place outside the leading ranked specialist tourism journals. Research on the period 2000-2010 reveals that Development Southern Africa and Africa Insight published the largest number of articles relating to the 15 countries of the Southern African Development Community. It is argued that since 2010 the African Journal for Physical, Health Education, Recreation and Dance has emerged as a new outlet for African tourism scholarship. This collection of tourism research articles in AJPHERD is a signal of the wider awakening of African tourism scholarship and confirms the rise of AJPHERD as a journal for publishing African tourism research.

Keywords: Tourism research, Africa, tourism journals.