Evaluation of leisure literature in the world: A research on Leisure Science's articles

This study aims to reveal scientific foundations of the leisure field and its interaction with other scientific fields by analyzing leisure literature. Within this scope, citation and bibliographic information which was obtained from 349 articles that were published in Leisure Science Journal between 1997 and 2012 were used. In order to compile and analyze data regarding leisure literature, bibliometric studies and social network analysis which are widely used in bibliometric studies were utilized. Based on the findings, bibliometric data on the areas, institutions, authors, subjects and publication that broadens scientific basis of leisure were revealed. In this context, despite leisure science appears to be related with many scientific fields in theoretical context, the interaction between these fields were found to be insufficient, and sports and tourism fields have significant contribution to the development of leisure literature. Although the Journal of Leisure Science has a global importance in the field of leisure, it was found that in terms of institutions in which the articles were prepared were limited to the institutions in North America and institutions in different regions have published only small number of articles. As a result, it can be inferred that Journal of Leisure Science has a regional isolation problem since it mainly publishes articles only from the institutions located in North America. Apart from this, although leisure literature is often fed by citations from the journals in the same field, it has been found that leisure was not become a subject in the journals of the other fields. Also it has been identified that the foundations of the leisure field were directly influenced by main fields such as sociology, psychology, management and health sciences. Lastly half-life of leisure literature is found, and due to this fact the view that sees leisure as a very young field which is open to new developments has emerged. Keywords: Evoluation of leisure, Leisure studies, Bibliometrics, Social network analysis, Citation analysis