Bibliometric analysis of scientific production in collective sports

Abstract

Currently, there has been an upturn in the growth of academic production as a consequence of the evolution of scientific literature on team sports. The aim of the study was to develop a bibliometric analysis of the scientific production on the most practiced team sports, contained in the Scopus database between 2002 and 2022. It was based on a descriptive and quantitative bibliometric analysis. The following combinations of terms were used in the search equations: Sport AND Collective, Soccer, Basketball, Handball, Volleyball, obtaining a total of 561 documents. The results show an increase in the number of academic papers published between 2016 and 2022 with a total of 420 documents (74.9%), most of these papers (92.7%) are scientific articles and more than half (61%) are studies in social sciences, medicine, sports and psychology, with Spain (15.9%) and Brazil (11.8%) being the main sources of scientific production. It is concluded that the bibliometric study contributes substantially to the scientific community by providing data on the most practiced team sports worldwide, which can facilitate future studies aimed at modeling and better characterizing the behavior, skills and abilities of individuals in team sports.