EDITORIAL

Editorial

Alfonso Vargas-Sánchez, José António C. Santos, Margarida Santos

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We are proud to announce that Tourism & Management Studies will, from now onwards, publish four issues per year in English. Until now, the journal has published two issues annually, one in English and one in Portuguese and Spanish. These issues had quite different characteristics and produced disparate results. The yearly issue in Portuguese and Spanish was targeted at an Iberian-American audience, and this publication attracted hundreds of papers from Brazil, Spain and Portugal. These issues contributed, for example, to making our journal one of the publications of reference in Brazil. However, its papers were rarely cited by high-ranked international journals. Instead, citations of these issues appeared in journals, books and theses in Portuguese and Spanish.

The same did not happen with the yearly issue in English, which was targeted at a more international audience. These issues have proved to be extremely successful and have accounted for an increasingly impressive number of citations in high-ranked international journals. As a result, the citation rate of Tourism & Management Studies articles in works published by Scopus and ISI indexed journals has been consistently growing over the last five years. This is evidenced by the following numbers: five citations in 2013, 11 citations in 2014, 36 citations in 2015 and 57 citations in 2016. In the announcements section of our journal’s website, you can find more detailed information about this trend.

By increasing the publication frequency from two to four issues per year, we will be able to reduce the number of papers published in each issue, limiting issues to eight papers on average. Whenever appropriate, we will publish special issues as well. The publication of fully citable papers with DOI ahead of print is also now within our scope, which we will implement soon, as all papers for the 2017 issues have already been approved. By doing this, we intend to reduce the time between submission and publication, which could be especially important to authors. The submission process is – and will be – continuous.

Our publication standards will be maintained and, whenever possible, improved. For instance, we are asking, in most cases, for a triple-blind review instead of double. Special care is being given to the quality of the review process and the reviewers, who are also evaluated based on their work by our journal. We consider the stability of the Scientific Board essential to ensuring the quality of the review process, but we also appreciate the need to renew the board whenever necessary.

Overall, the success of this publication is dependent on the many hours reviewers expend in order to control, improve and validate the materials published by this journal. We would like to acknowledge our reviewers’ dedication, and we hope that this new publication format will continue to be attractive to Brazilian, Spanish and Portuguese authors, as we are sure it will be to other international authors.

The Editors