Trends and Topics in Sports Research in the Social Science Citation Index from 1993 to 2008

Abstract

This descriptive study evaluated behavioral and social science research on sport for 1993 through 2008, examined the characteristics of sport research, and identified mainstream issues appearing during these 16 years. Based on the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) database from 1993 to 2008, 7,655 articles referring to sport or sports were available. The publication analyses showed that 13 core journals published the most articles in the behavioral sciences of sport. By analyzing all titles, author keywords, and KeyWords Plus, the results showed that physical education, athlete performance, and sports participation were the mainstream issues of sport research in the 16-year study period. The words adolescent, youth, and children frequently appeared, indicating that the emphasis of sport research focused on these participant groups. This bibliometric study reviewed global sports research in SSCI, and described certain patterns or trends in prior research on sport.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bradford

S. C.

(1934) Sources of information on specific subjects. Engineering, 137, 85–86.

Chiu

W. T.

Y. S.

(2007) Bibliometric analysis of tsunami research. Scientometrics, 73(1), 3–17.

Chuang

K. Y.

Huang

Y. L.

Y. S.

(2007) A bibliometric and citation analysis of stroke-related research in Taiwan. Scientometrics, 72(2), 201–212.

Colman

A. M.

Dhillon

Coulthard

(1995) A bibliometric evaluation of the research performance of British university politics departments: Publications in leading journals. Scientometrics, 32(1), 49–66.

Garfield

(1990) KeyWords Plus: ISI's breakthrough retrieval method. Part 1. Expanding your searching power on current contents on diskette. Current Contents, 32, 3–7.

Y. S.

(2007) Bibliometric analysis of adsorption technology in environmental science. Journal of Environmental Protection Science, 1(1), 1–11.

Knudson

D. V.

(2011) Authorship and sampling practice in selected biomechanics and sports science journals. Perceptual & Motor Skills, 112, 838–844.

Zhang

Wang

Y. S.

(2009) Bibliometric analysis of atmospheric simulation trends in meteorology and atmospheric science journals. Croatica Chemica Acta, 82(3), 695–705.

L. L.

Ding

G. H.

Feng

Wang

M. H.

Y. S.

(2009) Global stem cell research trend: Bibliometric analysis as a tool for mapping of trends from 1991 to 2006. Scientometrics, 80(1), 39–58.

10.

Noble

C. E.

(1965) Publication trends in human learning: 1940–1964. Perceptual & Motor Skills, 20, 959–960.

11.

Qin

(2000) Semantic similarities between a keyword database and a controlled vocabulary database: An investigation in the antibiotic resistance literature. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(2), 166–180.

12.

Rodriguez

Moreiro

J. A.

(1996) The growth and development of research in the field of ecology as measured by dissertation title analysis. Scientometrics, 35(1), 59–70.

13.

Santos

Garcia

(2011) A bibliometric analysis of sport economics research. International Journal of Sport Finance, 6(3), 222–244.

14.

Shilbury

(2011) A bibliometric analysis of four sport management journals. Sport Management Review, 14, 434–452.

15.

Tsigilis

Grouios

Tsorbatzoudis

Koidou

(2010) Impact factors of the sport sciences journals: Current trends, relative positions, and temporal stability. European Journal of Sport Science, 10(2), 81–90.

16.

Xie

S. D.

Zhang

Y. S.

(2008) Assessment of world aerosol research trends by bibliometric analysis. Scientometrics, 77(1), 113–130.

17.

Zitt

Bassecoulard

(1994) Development of a method for detection and trend analysis of research fronts built by lexical or cocitation analysis. Scientometrics, 30(1), 333–351.