This paper reviews 53 articles of measurement scale development published in six tourism journals (i.e., Annals of Tourism Research,Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Journal of Travel Research, Tourism Management, Tourism Science, and Tourism Tribune) between 1998 and 2017 to elucidate the developmental stages, topical areas and scale development process and statistical standards in the field of tourism studies. It is found that: (1) Studies on measurement scale development in tourism could be diachronically divided into two stages, namely the initial stage (1998-2007) and the quickly-developing stage (2008-2017). (2) The major research areas where measurement scales have been mostly developed are tourists (e.g., tourists’ perceptions, attitudes, and satisfaction), destination (e.g., destination image, brand equity, and sustainability), and residents (e.g., residents’ perceptions of and attitudes towards tourism development, and host-guest interactions). (3) Regarding the process of measurement scale development, the commonly followed procedures are generation of scale items, data collection, and assessment of reliability and validity. However, some measurement scale development studies have not strictly followed the procedures in terms of specification of the domains of construct, purification of scale items, pilot data collection, explorative factor analysis, and confirmative factor analysis, to a varying extent. On the contrary, most of the analyzed articles have strictly followed the psychometric standards in measurement scale development and reported the statistical analysis results that justified the psychometric properties of the scales that were newly developed and/or validated. The findings derived from this paper are believed to be able to guide future measurement scale development studies in the field of tourism in terms of research topics, development procedures, and psychometric properties required.