Millet Grégoire P, Brocherie Franck, Burtscher Johannes
Institute of Sport Sciences, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Front Sports Act Living. 2021 Oct 20;3:772140. doi: 10.3389/fspor.2021.772140. eCollection 2021.
The body of scientific literature on sports and exercise continues to expand. The summer and winter Olympic games will be held over a 7-month period in 2021-2022. We took this rare opportunity to quantify and analyze the main bibliometric parameters (i.e., the number of articles and citations) across all Olympic sports to weigh and compare their importance and to assess the structure of the "sport sciences" field. The present review aims to perform a bibliometric analysis of Olympic sports research. We quantified the following topics: (1) the most investigated sports; (2) the main journals in which the studies are published; (3) the main factors explaining sport-specific scientific attractiveness; (4) the influence of being in the Olympic programme, economic weight, and local influences on research output; and (5) which research topic is the most investigated across sports. We searched 116 sport/exercise journals on PubMed for the 40 summer and 10 winter Olympic sports. A total of 34,038 articles were filtered for a final selection of 25,003 articles (23,334 articles on summer sports and 1,669 on winter sports) and a total of 599,820 citations. Nine sports [football (soccer), cycling, athletics, swimming, distance & marathon running, basketball, baseball, tennis, and rowing] were involved in 69% of the articles and 75% of the citations. Football was the most cited sport, with 19.7 and 26.3% of the total number of articles and citations, respectively. All sports yielded some scientific output, but 11 sports (biathlon, mountain biking, archery, diving, trampoline, skateboarding, skeleton, modern pentathlon, luge, bobsleigh, and curling) accumulated a total of fewer than 50 publications. While ice hockey is the most prominently represented winter sport in the scientific literature, winter sports overall have produced minor scientific output. Further analyses show a large scientific literature on team sports, particularly American professional sports (i.e., baseball, basketball, and ice hockey) and the importance of inclusion in the Olympic programme to increasing scientific interest in "recent" sports (i.e., triathlon and rugby sevens). We also found local/cultural influence on the occurrence of a sport in a particular "sport sciences" journal. Finally, the relative distribution of six main research topics (i.e., physiology, performance, training and testing, injuries and medicine, biomechanics, and psychology) was large across sports and reflected the specific performance factors of each sport.
关于体育与运动的科学文献数量持续增长。2021年至2022年期间，夏季和冬季奥运会将历时7个月举行。我们利用这一难得的机会，对所有奥运项目的主要文献计量学参数（即文章数量和引用次数）进行量化和分析，以权衡和比较它们的重要性，并评估“体育科学”领域的结构。本综述旨在对奥运项目研究进行文献计量分析。我们对以下主题进行了量化：（1）研究最多的运动项目；（2）发表这些研究的主要期刊；（3）解释特定运动项目科学吸引力的主要因素；（4）列入奥运会项目、经济影响力和地方影响力对研究产出的影响；以及（5）所有运动项目中研究最多的主题。我们在PubMed上搜索了116种体育/运动期刊，涉及40个夏季奥运会项目和10个冬季奥运会项目。总共筛选出34,038篇文章，最终选定25,003篇文章（23,334篇关于夏季运动项目，1,669篇关于冬季运动项目），总引用次数为599,820次。9个运动项目[足球（英式足球）、自行车、田径、游泳、长跑和马拉松、篮球、棒球、网球和赛艇]的文章占比69%，引用次数占比75%。足球是被引用次数最多的运动项目，分别占文章总数和引用次数总数的19.7%和26.3%。所有运动项目都产生了一定的科研产出，但有11个运动项目（冬季两项、山地自行车、射箭、跳水、蹦床、滑板、钢架雪车、现代五项、雪橇、雪车和冰壶）的出版物总数少于50篇。虽然冰球是科学文献中最具代表性的冬季运动项目，但总体而言，冬季运动项目的科研产出较少。进一步分析表明，关于团队运动项目，特别是美国职业运动项目（即棒球、篮球和冰球）有大量的科学文献，并且列入奥运会项目对于提高对“新兴”运动项目（即铁人三项和七人制橄榄球）的科学关注度具有重要意义。我们还发现了地方/文化因素对某一运动项目在特定“体育科学”期刊上发表情况的影响。最后，六个主要研究主题（即生理学、运动表现、训练与测试、损伤与医学、生物力学和心理学）在各运动项目中的相对分布差异较大，反映了每个运动项目的特定表现因素。
