# What Are the Drivers of Citations?: Application in Tourism and Hospitality Journals
## 2 Literature Review
### Maturity of Research Topics  
While articles on high-demand or general topics are likely to attract more attention from fellow researchers than less popular or specific topics, topic attributes have been understated, especially in the tourism and hospitality literature. Most academic papers contain multiple research topics that have attracted researchers in various areas [9]. For example, an article testing the use of technology in the foodservice industry was mostly cited by fellow researchers with expertise in information technology or foodservice operations; thus, [PERSON], [PERSON] and [PERSON] [46] tested the association between the concentration of research topics and citation counts. Articles with salient core topics were more visible than those with a widespread topic distribution. The study speculated that a concentrated key topic strongly connects with the existing research, such that fellow researchers can easily accept new research topics.  
[PERSON], et al. [51] proposed \"the evolution of a new subject needs to build on the knowledge accumulation of relevant subjects\" (p. 80). Likewise, the maturity of the topics is specific to research subtopics, resulting in different citation behaviors. Therefore, it is also necessary to consider the topic's originality, which indicates the chronological order in which a particular research topic or method is introduced to the tourism and hospitality literature [52]. Research questions have often been developed based on accumulated knowledge in the field; hence, other researchers may pay attention to recent bibliographic coupling with the newly developed framework and sophisticated methodology [53]. While [PERSON], [PERSON] and [PERSON] [46] found that a research paper containing the original ideas received higher citations in the management literature, the opposite was true in other disciplines [54]. That is, novel ideas that differ from existing concepts or methods are challenged and not well accepted by peers and are thus rarely cited [30]. It is also possible that fundamental theory and basic research, rather than a newly developed framework, may be valued in a particular discipline because of their scientific impact sustained over the years [14].  
Many systematic review studies have been conducted on hospitality and tourism to understand the progress of research topics [9; 17; 55; 56; 57; 58]. Previous studies have examined the evolution of citations within a particular research topic [58; 59] or identified individual research papers that received high citations [56]. More specifically, some studies have focused on bibliometrics-based studies in the field of hospitality and tourism [59; 60; 61]. However, empirical evidence regarding the role of research topic attributes on citation counts, including topic originality and concentration, is still lacking [52].  
Previous studies examining the effects of research subtopics on citation counts adopted manual content analysis to discover research topics, which required a long time for data analysis and can be challenged in reproducing data due to subjectivity [14; 19]. To overcome these limitations, this study tested generally adopted citation factors and research topic attributes discovered by text mining using hospitality and tourism articles.