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In order to understand the trend of tourism research, evaluation of tourism-related journals is necessary. Specifically, there needs to be a focus on subject areas since they represent the researchers' scope and purpose. Many previous studies have primarily explored those journals mainly in the field of tourism and hospitality. However, analysis of the marginal areas of tourism research, such as journals of leisure and event, has not been widely conducted. The purpose of this paper is to obtain a brand-new and comprehensive framework of mutually exclusive tourism research areas through reviewing the current literatures on systematic works and specific knowledge domains within the tourism discipline. Based on the track of earlier studies, the construction of our tourism research system mainly adopts the essential framework from Mill and Morrison's tourism system with reference to the three other important tourism systems. The tourism research system framework which is proposed by this study, is composed of six main categories (Destination; Demand; Travel; Marketing; Geographical areas; and Generic terms) and sixty-one sub-categories to summarize the keywords' classification and related subject areas. In the tourism research categorization system, there are 25 sub-categories under 'Destination', 13 in 'Marketing', 11 in 'Demand', 4 in 'Travel' and 7 in 'Generic groups'. A database of 41,624 author-selected keywords was extracted from 10,058 research articles in 31 target journals, including tourism, hospitality, and leisure journals. Keywords are codified by authors themselves, strongly reflecting an article's content, such as subject content, topic, and geographical focus of their articles. The major research goals were to develop this framework and then assess the frequency levels of specific tourism research subject areas in the 10-year period of 2003-2012. The destination category captured the most keywords, followed by demand and then marketing. The results show that one article contains 4.13 keywords on average, and the repetition rate of keywords is 3.04. The results of keyword frequency patterns indicated that, 'Market Segmentation' and 'Attractions and Events' are the two most popular research subjects. Insides the data analysis, the top three most popular research areas, 'Market segmentation', 'Attractions and Events' and 'Images and Perceptions', are belonged to the categories of 'Marketing', 'Destination' and 'Demand' respectively. By contrast, "Infrastructure" and "Transportation" appeared infrequently. As two fundamental resource components of tourism, it is important to consider why tourism researchers seemed to be overlooking them. There are several plausible reasons including the availability of other academic journal outlets in transportation and engineering; the lack of relative appeal of these topics to tourism researchers; and the maturing of destinations in many parts of the world. The result has also suggested that further research could be concerned more with 'Seasonality' and 'Travel flows' to provide a theoretical underpinning for effective management and tourist satisfaction, as well as the relation among 'Stakeholders' in tourism phenomenon. From the analysis of sub-category of 'Geographical areas', it shows that geography related terms appeared 2960 times with 296 keywords. In detail, China (including Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan) ranked number one for frequency count, followed by USA, Australia, UK, and Spain. The result connotes that, in the past ten years, China became one of the fascinating object in the field of international tourism research. Moreover, this research also conducted a chronological analysis to explore time-periodic trends (1980-2013) of the top 20 most frequently appeared keywords, as well as the relationship between sixty-one sub-categories of tourism research system and discipline tree of tourism studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]