Foundations of hospitality performance measurement research: A co-citation approach.

Highlights • This study discusses evolution of the main theoretical pillars of hotel performance. • This study explores when and where these pillars were published. • 56,163 citations from 734 articles published between 1996–2015 were considered. • Four phases, including embryonal phase, foundation phase, development phase, and maturity phase were identified. • Tourism and hospitality journals host more "fresh" studies in hotel performance literature. Abstract Studies related to hospitality performance measurement have expanded and matured, leading to diversity in the themes and topics of papers published on the subject. Though many papers have highlighted the trends, clusters, and topics, the present article is the first known academic study attempting to explore the architectural structure of this research stream. Using a database with 56,163 citations, the authors categorized the empirical evidence into four different time periods and an overall representation. Consequently, this paper adopts a co-citation approach to explore the number of articles published in the field of hotel performance studies. Finally, using the VOSviewer software program, this article identifies the most popular cross-cited journals and authors. The study focuses only on the foundation papers identified using co-citations and network cluster analysis, thereby revealing the architectural structure of this literature stream and contributing to the literature on hotel performance measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]