Today, we analyze an article published in so-called prestigious tourism journal. The title of the article is “Unveiling the dynamics between consumer brand engagement, experience, and relationship quality towards luxury hotel brands: Moderating investigation of brand reputation” published in the International Journal of Hospitality Management, which is a Clarivate SSCI (Impact Factor 2023: 11.7), Scopus (ScimagoJR Q1), and Cabell’s Directory of Publishing Opportunities in Marketing indexed Tourism Journal. The journal is published by Elsevier.

Our first observation is about poor English language used in the article. The authors don’t know how to properly use basic parts of speech like articles, verbs, prepositions etc. The most surprising thing for us is, the Editors and Reviewers of the journal completely failed to detect the poor/erroneous language. The journal published the article without any copyediting/technical/orthographic editing. The language blunders can be seen everywhere in the article. We only pointed out few blunders which can be seen in the article PDF file available at the end of the article.

Our second observation is about conceptual framework. The authors proposed the framework in “Introduction” section. We wonder that Editors and Reviewers had no idea about placement of framework in the article. The framework should be reported after proposing all hypotheses at the end of Literature Review section.

Our third objection is on the level of analysis. The authors clearly mentioned on page no. 2:

“The present study intends to fulfill the aforesaid gaps by combining both individual-level behaviors/dispositions and organizational-related factors in an integrated theoretical framework in luxury hotel brand context, as shown in Fig. 1. Particularly, the current study aims to investigate the interface of three important organizational strategic factors i.e., service environment (Bitner, 1992; Hightower et al., 2002), brand-equity (Aaker, 1991; Keller, 1993), and brand reputation (Akdeniz et al., 2013; Touni et al., 2022; Veloutsou and Moutinho, 2010) with individual-related factors – CBX, CBE, and BRQ.”

On page no. 6, Authors mention:

We used purposive non-probability-sampling method to accumulate the survey data from consumers to the aforementioned cites/destinations,…

These reports clearly show that the study clearly overlooked the correct level of analysis and conducted the analyses in wrong way, therefore, committed clear Type IV errors.

Our fourth point is about the reporting of analyses in AMOS. Authors reported the t-statistics as significance test for their hypotheses. In fact, AMOS doesn’t use t-statistics as significance test but use Critical Ratio (C.R) test as significance test. Reporting t-statistics is wrong. We wonder that Editors are Reviewer completely failed to catch this very apparent mistake.

In addition, Standard Errors (S.Es) are very important in AMOS analysis reporting. The authors didn’t provide the S.Es which is quite strange. We wonder that Editors and Reviewers also didn’t ask Authors to report S.Es. We have calculated S.Es for Table 4 by ourselves and found that all S.Es cluster around 0.05. Almost Similar S.Es for all hypotheses, high values of R-square, and very less variation in Beta values direct us to an alarming position. We, therefore, concluded that either data were manipulated or the data suffer from severe GLM assumptions violations.

We also observed that the theoretical rational to propose Moderation and Mediation relationships is also not reported. In introduction, Research Question(s) were not formulated at all.

There are many other issues found in the article that can be seen by clicking on below link:

Unveiling the dynamics between consumer brand engagement, experience, and relationship quality towards luxury hotel brands: Moderating investigation of brand reputation. (Please copy and paste the link in your browser if the given link is redirected to a wrong website.)

In principle, this article should be retracted.

Previously, memebrs of our team presented their analyses on many flawed articles published in Clarivate/Scopus indexed Business Journals. We wonder how so-called top-tier Clarivate/Scopus Impact Factor journals publish such articles. Why Editors and Reviewers fail to detect such noticeable mistakes? Why journals fail to apply standard quality control on articles they receive for publication? Even after publishing such flawed articles, these journals get higher Impact Factors (IFs) and Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIPs). Such publications are deteriorating the Science and creating space for Socially Constructed Academic Artifacts (SCAA).

Update: On 19 December, 2023, Dr. Manuel Rivera, (Assistant Dean of Research, UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management / Editor in Chief International Journal of Hospitality Management) assured that the case will be discussed with the authors and will update the “Scholarly Criticism” in due course.