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In light of the shift in focus from information communication technology (ICT) access (access divide) and skills (skills divide) to the tangible impacts of ICT use (impact divide), a growing number of scholars have called for further investigation into the inter-territorial and multi-dimensional aspects of the digital divide in China. This study aims to address these gaps by examining the disparities across 31 provinces, particularly emphasizing the transition from the traditional access and skills divides to the impact divide.

Multivariate regression analysis extensively investigates the transition from the access and skills divides to the impact divide across 31 provinces. Additionally, ArcGIS software is used to analyze spatial agglomeration and the auto-correlation (Moran-i) and predict mapping patterns in the data corresponding to all three levels of the digital divide.

According to the study's findings, poverty is a significant factor in the digital divide between different regions in China. The research shows that provinces with advanced administrative systems, such as Guangdong, Shanghai, Beijing, Jiangsu, Shandon and Zhejiang, have high scores on the digital development index (DDI). However, regions with poverty-ridden and rural areas, primarily located in southwest, central and western China, tend to have lower DDI scores.

This study offers a novel contribution to the literature by presenting an innovative conceptual framework that explores the impact divide within China's provinces. The authors also address this lacuna in the literature by developing and testing two dimensions to examine the relationships statistically under a wide range of socioeconomic and ICT indicators.

Using a qualitative approach, this cross-disciplinary study integrating modern slavery, tourism and marketing expertise outlines Chinese outbound tourists' perceptions of and reactions to issues related to child sex tourism.

In total, 27 in-depth interviews were conducted, and data were analysed. Manual coding was chosen as an efficient method to process qualitative interview data given the relatively small sample size in this study.

Three main themes emerged from analysis: (1) tourists' negative perceptions of child sex tourism; (2) tourist boycotts against child sex tourism destinations and activities as reactions to this socially deviant and illegal phenomenon and (3) tourist advocacy to enhance public awareness of child sex tourism. These themes suggest that tourists, as key tourism stakeholders, have difficulty accepting that child sex tourism occurs and would like to identify solutions to end illegal activities. Tourist boycotts would positively affect sustainable tourism development by eliminating illegal businesses, including those involving child prostitution, from the tourism industry. The qualitative method is applied here to develop a conceptual framework explaining tourists' perceptions of and reactions to child sex tourism.

A conceptual framework of Chinese individuals' perceptions of and reactions to child sex tourism has been devised using a qualitative approach. Although this framework takes child sex tourism as its focus, it can also be applied to better understand tourists' perspectives of other socially deviant or illegal behaviours within the tourism industry. The findings of this study provide valuable implications for various tourism stakeholders.

The current study makes significant theoretical and practical contributions to an under-researched topic – child sex tourism. A conceptual framework of Chinese individuals' perceptions of and reactions to child sex tourism has been devised using a qualitative approach. Findings from this study may inspire campaigns to protect children from being drawn into sex tourism. Efforts should also be undertaken to rescue children who have already been victimised by illegal businesses.

This paper aims to introduce an under-researched concept, travel medicine, to the hospitality field and proposes future research directions. This paper also highlights the need to acknowledge the missing link between hospitality and medical science and encourages research on the health of hotel guests, especially those with mental disorders.

By synthesizing relevant literature, this study proposes a conceptual framework focused on identifying and filling knowledge gaps between hospitality and medical science. Pathways for empirical research on hotel guests’ travel health are suggested accordingly.

This paper reveals that the topic of travel medicine has been neglected in hospitality, especially in relation to vulnerable hotel guests. Additionally, this study suggests that researchers should move beyond the confines of social science and conduct interdisciplinary hospitality studies. In-depth analyses of hotel guests’ health and safety are also recommended.

This conceptual piece serves as a “provocation” that is exploratory, thus laying a foundation for future interdisciplinary studies bridging hospitality and medical science. This paper offers practical significance for hospitality stakeholders (i.e. academics, practitioners, hotel guests and society) and also provides guidelines on how to create vulnerability-friendly hospitality environments.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study takes an important step toward interdisciplinary research between hospitality and medical science through the lens of travel medicine. This paper offers insight to bridge these disciplines and extend hospitality research into medical science. This paper further identifies an under-investigated topic and feasible research avenues that can offer timely solutions for hospitality academics and practitioners.

The purpose of this research is to investigate how the negative effect of litigation risk on firm performance could be controlled through the channel of voluntary disclosure and under the condition of institutional ownership.

To get the objectives, the study analyzed an unbalanced panel of 918 non-financial listed Chinese firms from 2010 to 18. To capture any expected unobserved heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation in the unbalanced sample, the authors have applied fixed effect regression with robust standard errors clustered at the firms' levels as suggested by Newey and West (1987).

The research provides that the good disclosure practices and presence of institutional ownership in corporations raise the trust of the investors by making the corporate operation clear in the eyes of the stakeholders. This increases the corporate credibility and as consequence corporations are protected against litigation risk. Thus, in the light of the information asymmetry and signaling theories, voluntary disclosure practices, and financial institutions' ownership, bridges the information gap and transmit a positive signal in the market regarding the better financial performance of the corporations.

These findings are helpful for the corporate managers for effective strategic decisions, regulatory authorities for policy formulation, and individual investors for developing a diversified investment portfolio.

By applying the mediation and moderation effects, the research enhances the understanding of the underlying causes of the association between a firm's litigation risk and its performance. The current research contributes to the literature, that agency issues which create litigation risk could be settled internally with voluntary disclosure practices and externally with institutional ownership.

This study examined the dynamical and positive effects of leader consultation on employee proactivity from a motivational perspective.

Survey data were collected twice a day from 107 employees in a week by using an experience sampling method.

On a daily basis, leader consultation had a positive effect on employees’ state work engagement, which in turn promoted employees’ proactivity. Moreover, authoritarian leadership weakened the positive relationship between leader consultation and employees’ state work engagement.

The findings provided a new perspective regarding the potential dynamic motivational effect of leader consultation on employees and generated interesting implications for paradoxical leadership theory.

The main purpose of this research paper is to generate a holistic bibliometric study of the tourism industry and COVID-19 fields, to further investigate the current interests and trends emerging from scientific collaboration and thematic analysis and to identify research gaps that indicate future research directions.

This study conducts several analyses, which include the co-authorship and social network analysis, co-citation and keyword co-occurrence knowledge structures. The authors generate a knowledge map of the leading articles and link them with previous literature to elucidate the debates and consensus in research on COVID-19 and tourism.

Research interests concentrate in the USA, China, Europe and the Oceania areas, so more cross-continental collaborations are expected among them and with other regions. Popular topics are tourism sustainable transformation, crisis management and multidisciplinary fields like tourism, hospitality, information technology and environmental sciences. This paper also identifies underexplored topics for future investigation on the social, environmental, cultural and governance dimensions of sustainable tourism.

This paper contributes to guiding tourism researchers in identifying and finding publication references and future collaborations. Moreover, the investigation of knowledge structures could be beneficial for scholars hoping to broaden the current understanding of this field and discover potential for future tourism research, especially in the global pandemic and other severe health crises.

This study enriches the existing literature in the fields of tourism and the pandemic and highlights current interests and research trends exploring scientific collaboration, thematic analysis and knowledge mapping.

This review aims to give a critical view of the wheel/rail high frequency vibration-induced vibration fatigue in railway bogie.

Vibration fatigue of railway bogie arising from the wheel/rail high frequency vibration has become the main concern of railway operators. Previous reviews usually focused on the formation mechanism of wheel/rail high frequency vibration. This paper thus gives a critical review of the vibration fatigue of railway bogie owing to the short-pitch irregularities-induced high frequency vibration, including a brief introduction of short-pitch irregularities, associated high frequency vibration in railway bogie, typical vibration fatigue failure cases of railway bogie and methodologies used for the assessment of vibration fatigue and research gaps.

The results showed that the resulting excitation frequencies of short-pitch irregularity vary substantially due to different track types and formation mechanisms. The axle box-mounted components are much more vulnerable to vibration fatigue compared with other components. The wheel polygonal wear and rail corrugation-induced high frequency vibration is the main driving force of fatigue failure, and the fatigue crack usually initiates from the defect of the weld seam. Vibration spectrum for attachments of railway bogie defined in the standard underestimates the vibration level arising from the short-pitch irregularities. The current investigations on vibration fatigue mainly focus on the methods to improve the accuracy of fatigue damage assessment, and a systematical design method for vibration fatigue remains a huge gap to improve the survival probability when the rail vehicle is subjected to vibration fatigue.

The research can facilitate the development of a new methodology to improve the fatigue life of railway vehicles when subjected to wheel/rail high frequency vibration.

This paper aims to theorize and examine how central cognition elaboration cue and peripheral cognition elaboration cue influence users’ health information sharing intention in Strong ties social media (STSM) in emerging markets.

This paper innovatively proposes two concepts of health information emotion and health information sharing value based on the in-depth observation of users’ social health behavior. We integrate Elaboration Likelihood Model, Media Richness Theory, Trust Theory and Regulatory Focus Theory to develop hypotheses and research models and lay emphasis on the study of health information emotion’s moderating effect. This paper conducts an empirical study by selecting 372 health information users of WeChat, a typical STSM, to verify the research model by structural equation model.

For the central route, individual motivation and health information richness positively influence health information sharing value. For peripheral route, health information source trust and health information recipient trust both positively influence the health information sharing attitude. Health information sharing value and sharing attitude can positively affect users’ health information sharing intention. In addition, health information positive emotion has significant moderating effect, while health information negative emotion does not have.

This study contributes to a comprehensive perspective for understanding users’ health information sharing intention in STSM in emerging markets, an important but understudied topic. The results can also give implications for researchers to explore users’ behavioral intention from the perspective of process-oriented persuasion and health information emotion’s moderating effect.

With the development of inclusive financial business in China in recent years, this case describes the credit risk control of “mobile credit”, a smart online credit platform launched by Shanghai Mobanker Co. Ltd. (referred to as “Mobanker”, previously named as “Shanghai Mobanker Financial Information Service Co., Ltd.”) which provides technical services for inclusive finance industry.

As the core technology of blockchain, various consensus mechanisms have emerged to satisfy the demands of different application scenarios. Since determining the security, scalability and other related performance of the blockchain, how to reach consensus efficiently of consensus mechanism is a critical issue in the blockchain.

The paper opted for a research overview on the blockchain consensus mechanism, including the consensus mechanisms' consensus progress, classification and comparison, which are complemented by documentary analysis.

This survey analyzes solutions for the improvement of consensus mechanisms in blockchain that have been proposed during the last few years and suggests future research directions around consensus mechanisms. First, the authors outline the consensus processes, the advantages and disadvantages of the mainstream consensus mechanisms. Additionally, the consensus mechanisms are subdivided into four types according to their characteristics. Then, the consensus mechanisms are compared and analyzed based on four evaluation criteria. Finally, the authors summarize the representative progress of consensus mechanisms and provide some suggestions on the design of consensus mechanisms to make further advances in this field.

This paper summarizes the future research development of the consensus mechanisms.