Sincere thanks to Richard Teare and strengthening the IJCHM brand further

Citation

Okumus, F. (2008), "Sincere thanks to Richard Teare and strengthening the IJCHM brand further", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 20 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijchm.2008.04120baa.001

Sincere thanks to Richard Teare and strengthening the IJCHM brand further

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Volume 20, Issue 2.

Sincere thanks to Richard Teare and strengthening the IJCHM brand further

After 20 years of service, Dr Richard Teare has stepped down from the editorship of International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management (IJCHM) and I am honored to be the new editor of this prestigious journal. IJCHM is now considered as a tier one journal in the hospitality management field. Emerald has over 180 journals and IJCHM is among their top-ten journals in terms of downloaded articles annually. For example, in 2006 the total number of IJCHM articles downloaded from Emerald database was 453,801. The same number for the first six months of 2007 was above 240,000. McKercher et al.’s (2006) article published in Tourism Management identified IJCHM among the first four leading journals in the hospitality management field.

On April 17 2007, Professor Chris Ryan, the editor of Tourism Management (Ryan, 2007) sent an e-mail to the Trinet e-mail group to share his journal rankings in the tourism and hospitality field. In his e-mail, he ranked IJCHM as a tier one journal in the hospitality management field. A study from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University looked at citations made to hospitality journals at www.googlescholar.com. We are publishing the research findings of this study in this issue (Law and Van der Veen, 2008). This study found that articles published in IJCHM receive the highest mean citation compared to articles published in other hospitality journals. We owe these great achievements very much to Richard’s vision, clear editorial strategy, leadership and hard work, Emerald’s publishing, distribution and promotion strategy, ongoing support of our Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) members and finally very much to our readers and authors.

Our next task will be to strengthen IJCHM brand even further. Under my editorship, there will not be major changes in our editorial policy. We will particularly pursue the following goals:

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  More emphasis on practical implications: As being part of the Emerald database, IJCHM has a large international readership. The profile of our readers encompasses a high proportion of industry managers, students and academics. With our readership in mind, one of our particular goals will always be to encourage our authors to “think audience”. We will strive to ensure that every article addresses the “So what?” question in terms of practical implications for practicing managers and students. Our Editorial Advisory Board consists of both leading academics and successful industry executives. At least one of the three reviewers will be a practicing executive in the industry or would have an extensive managerial experience in the industry. In short, every article published in IJCHM should provide clear practical implications.

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  More emphasis on theory building and stronger methodology sections: IJCHM is an applied journal. However, this does not mean that we publish papers with weak literature review and methodologies. Every full article published in IJCHM should provide cutting edge theoretical discussions and employ sound methodologies. However, what we require from our authors is to write their papers in a way that practicing managers and students can comfortably follow and understand the research findings and discussions. In other words, papers published in IJCHM should be able to integrate theory and practice well. Through the pursuit of high quality content, IJCHM brand name will continue to be synonymous with excellence within the hospitality management field. It is certainly our ultimate goal to make IJCHM as an ISI journal within the next three years.

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  Faster review process: We will strive to complete the review process of each article within three months. We now accept submissions via e-mail. Upon receipt of a new paper submission, the author(s) will be notified within 48 hours. If the paper is found suitable for IJCHM, it will be sent out to three reviewers and they need to review the paper and submit their reports within four weeks. We have developed a computerized database to manage the review process, which will save time both for us and for the authors. Received, revised and accepted dates will be published with each paper to indicate the review process.

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  Rigorous double blind review process: IJCHM receives over 150 papers annually and our acceptance rate has been about 30 per cent. Each paper will be reviewed by three individuals. We will endeavor to include both academics and practitioners in this process. A recommendation from reviewers for publication will not always guarantee inclusion in IJCHM. The paper should also meet the editorial goals. It may sometimes take multiple revisions to prepare an article for publication in IJCHM.

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  International Editorial Advisory Board (EAB): IJCHM already has a very strong and respected EAB, which consists of leading academics and successful industry executives. We will continue adding new members to our EAB from all around the world who will help us raise the profile of IJCHM even further.

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  Support for junior and non-English-speaking authors: We particularly encourage research students, junior faculty members and industry practitioners from all around the world to submit their papers to IJCHM. When a new submission is received, we will read it very carefully and if the paper is not yet ready for the double blind review process or if it is not yet fully aligned with our editorial policy, we will provide the authors specific suggestions on how they can enhance their papers before we send them out for review. We will be indeed happy to continue working with authors until their papers are ready for the blind review process. If the authors are not native speakers and their papers need to be proofread to enhance their readability, we can direct them to Emerald Literati Editing Service. Our reviewers will be more understanding and supportive to papers written by non-native speakers and junior researchers. If and when our reviewers do not find a paper suitable for publication in IJCHM, they will still provide constructive and detailed feedback on how the paper can be enhanced before submitting it to another journal. Again if and when a full paper is not found suitable for publication in IJCHM, we may encourage the authors to submit it as a research in brief paper.

We would like to ask for support in the following areas:

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  Promotion: Please promote IJCHM whenever and wherever possible in your lectures, meetings, presentations and professional discussions. If you would request an “authors workshop” at your institution to assist your research students, faculty members and/or managers in writing papers for IJCHM, please let us know. We would be happy to arrange this.

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  Submission: We are happy to publish your first full or research in brief paper. However, we also want to publish your best paper. We would very much appreciate if you continue encouraging your students, friends and colleagues as well as leading scholars in the field to submit their papers to IJCHM.

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  Help with the review process: If you are a member of our EAB, we greatly appreciate your help in reviewing papers within given time with detailed and constructive feedback. If you are not a member of our EAB yet, you can join our ad-hoc reviewers’ pool by contacting us. Our ad-hoc reviewers will be eventually promoted to our EAB.

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  Citation: IJCHM will be assessed by Thompson’s Journal Citation Report in coming years for Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). ‘Citation impact’ of articles published in IJCHM will be an important factor in this assessment. Therefore, we would very much appreciate if you continue citing IJCHM articles if and where appropriate.

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  Electronic usage: We would appreciate if you, your students and your colleagues continue downloading IJCHM articles for courses, workshops, research projects and presentations.

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  Feedback: Please continue sharing your views, comments and suggestions with us about how we can make IJCHM stronger and more successful.

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  Special issues: If you would like to edit a special issue on an important and current theme, please contact us with a proposal.

This issue of IJCHM contains articles on popularity of hospitality journals, destination marketing, customer satisfaction in restaurants, cultural affects on customer satisfaction, burnout among middle managers, employee welfare, capital asset pricing, operational performance of head care food service system, and satisfaction of mega event attendees.

In the opening article, Rob Law and Robert van der Veen used Google Scholar to evaluate the citation counts of the leading hospitality journals. According to their study that IJCHM performed the best in average citations per year and received the largest number of average citations per published article.

Marketing themes feature in three articles. Youcheng Wang and Shaul Krakover analyzed the business relationships among the tourism industry stakeholders in destination marketing activities. They found that different relationships of cooperation, competition and coopetition coexist among the tourism stakeholders. Their study provided important recommendations on how the tourism industry shareholders can cooperate and compete at the same time. In the next article, Young Namkung and SooCheong Jang investigated key quality attributes that distinguish highly satisfied diners from non-highly satisfied diners. They collected data from four mid-to-upper scale restaurants and found that appealing food presentation, tasty food, spatial seating arrangement, fascinating interior design, pleasing background music, reliable service, responsive service, and competent employees are important attributes in contributing to the high satisfaction of diners. In the next article Rui Jin Hoare and Ken Butcher investigated the antecedent roles of the Chinese cultural values of “face” and “harmony” in influencing customer satisfaction/loyalty, and the service quality dimensions that are most salient to the context of Chinese diners. Their study findings revealed three service quality dimensions: interaction quality, food appeal and performance comparison. They found that both cultural factors and three quality dimensions are significantly and positively correlated to both customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Human resources management themes feature in two articles. The article by Ayse Kuruuzum, Nilgün Anafarta and Sezgin Irmak examined the effects of job satisfaction, job characteristics and demographics on levels of burnout among middle managers in the Turkish hospitality industry. The authors collected data from 139 middle managers in four and five-star hotels in a major tourist destination in Turkey and found that excessive workload, lack of support from senior management, task complexity, and role ambiguity increase the emotional exhaustion of middle managers and decrease their performance levels. The second article under this category by Tracey Dickson and Jeremy Huyton explored the extent to which employee welfare and human resource management impacts upon customer service. The authors collected data from a number of operational staff of the Mount Kosciusko ski fields in Australia. Their findings demonstrated a need for effective management skills and employment strategies that reflect the needs of seasonal staff.

Seoki Lee and Arun Upneja compared traditional methods to estimate the cost-of-equity (capital asset pricing model and Fama and French three-factor model) to a new approach, implied cost-of-equity method to provide lodging analysts, investors, executives and researchers with a more reliable way to estimate cost-of-equity. The authors used data from publicly traded lodging firms in the USA and found that the price-to-forward earnings (PFE) using the implied cost-of-equity (ICE) approach estimates cost-of-equity of publicly traded lodging firms more reliably, compared with CAPM. Albert Assaf, Ken Matawie and Deborah Blackman provided a comprehensive comparison and analysis of the performance of different types of healthcare foodservice systems. Findings from this study should help foodservice directors distinguish between the operational performance of the different foodservice systems and as result introduce the system that best suits their individual hospital.

Finally, in their research in brief paper, Thomas Bauer, Rob Law, Tony Tse, and Karin Weber examined the factors of motivation and satisfaction of mega-business events, using the ITU Telecom World 2006 that was held in Hong Kong as a case study. Their study showed the respondents attended the event mainly for business and networking opportunities and there were no significant differences in perception between overseas and local attendees in all but two attributes.

Fevzi OkumusEditor