Scienza dello sport: temi, sport e risultati

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.

This comprehensive review provides interesting outcomes that are summarized briefly here and discussed afterwards:

1. There is a large difference in scientific output among sports, with nine sports representing 75% of the citations and 11 having a total of fewer than 50 associated publications.
2. Football (soccer) is by far the leading Olympic sport in terms of bibliometrics.
3. Team sports, particularly American professional sports (i.e., baseball, basketball, ice hockey), generate high scientific interest.
4. Overall, winter sports generate minor scientific output.
5. Most articles have been published in a limited number of journals.
6. Whether the inclusion of a sport in the Olympic programme translates into an increase in scientific publications remains unclear.
7. We also report some influence of local/cultural factors and/or of editorial board composition on the importance of a given sport in a given journal.
8. Finally, the distribution of articles among six main research topics (i.e., physiology, performance, training and testing, injuries and medicine, biomechanics, and psychology) highlights the (scientific) performance determinants of each sport.

Surprisingly, in every sport, the number of publications on psychology-related topics is quite low. Only for curling, shooting, and modern pentathlon are >10% of the sport-specific publications related to psychology, followed by table tennis. All these sports require extreme accuracy and self-control. The possibility that this low representation of psychological articles relates to the applied methodology (e.g., the database searched was PubMed) cannot be excluded, but most of the leading sport psychology journals (e.g., Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology) were included in our search. These findings thus could also indicate that sport psychology is less represented than other scientific areas (physiology, medicine) in the literature. The potential underrepresentation of sport psychology should encourage sport psychologists or mental coaches to publish more of their research since there is no doubt that mental skills are an important aspect of performance in all sports.