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Recent years have seen a rapid increase in the number of tourism academic research articles, but there is as yet no system for assessing this literature because of a lack of relevant data in existing journal-evaluation databases. It is thus difficult to objectively analyze and assess the quality and academic influence of China's tourism journal articles. This is not conducive to the management and development of academic journals, and neither is it conducive to a comprehensive, objective understanding of the nature, connotation, and denotation of tourism. In this study, the core journals of tourism disciplines were screened out using Bradford's law of literature dispersion--a well-known bibhometric principle whose main application is to select and evaluate core journals. We dispensed with conventional discipline classifications and determined the number of tourism papers published in academic journals according to various related disciplines. We identified five kinds of journal evaluation indicators--the number of tourism scholarly articles, the total number of cited articles, the number of articles downloaded from the Web, and the ratio of funded papers, five-year impact factor--and ranked the core journals according to the level of the five-year impact factor. Finally, we evaluated the academic influence of these core journals and their contribution to tourism. This study used 16 word units (basic terms taken from the key words of papers) as search terms; tourism, travel, recreation, leisure, vacation, tourist, tour guide, hotel, restaurant, accommodation, scenic attraction, landscape, scenery, park, exhibition, and destination. We used these terms as search items in article titles in three influential Chinese academic journal databases; the Chinese Journal Full-text Database, VIP China Science and Technology Journal Database, and Wan Fang Digital Journal Database. For the period 2005 -2010, we retrieved 80,831 tourism research articles, which had been published in 6,367 journals. Based on bibliometrics and Bradford's law, these journals were divided into three zones; the core area, relevant area, and non-correlation area. The core area consisted of 89 journals and a collection of 26,652 articles; the relevant area contained 613 journals and a collection of 26,944 articles; and non-correlation area contained 5,664 journals and a collection of 26,976 articles. These figures were consistent with Bradford's law of literature distribution. The 89 journals in the core area are the most influential academic publications in tourism. We calculated the five journal-evaluation indicators for the 89 core journals. We then sorted the 89 journals according to their five-year impact factor. In the resulting tables, journals with a higher five-year impact factor had a greater proportion of the funded papers. Moreover, of the top 32 journals in the ranking table, 72% were included in the catalog of nationally recognized core journals, which validates the scientific rationale of the evaluation criteria used in this study. Finally, in accordance with the discipline catalog of the Ministry of Education, the 89 journals in the core area were divided into 13 categories; tourism, geography, economics, commerce and trade, agriculture, management, forestry, urban planning, architecture, statistics, sports science, other classes, and comprehensive. We calculated the number of publications in each category, the number of articles, the citation frequency, and the Web download frequency to analyze the relationship between the various disciplines and tourism and to determine their contribution to tourism. The statistics showed that three disciplines--economics, geography, and commerce and trade--were more influential than the others. When evaluated according to their academic influence and contribution to tourism, we found that the following 12 Chinese journals ranked at the top; Tourism Tribune, Human Geography, Geography and Geo-Information Science, Economic Geography, Tourism Science, Areal Research and Development, Journal of Beijing International Studies University, Inquiry into Economic Issues, Journal of And Land Resources and Environment, Commercial Research, Journal of Guilin Institute of Tourism, and Social Scientist. In addition to journals in tourism, academic journals in the fields of geography, economics, and business and trade have contributed substantially to tourism academic literature. These findings provide a reference for understanding the research status of domestic tourism and related sub-disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]