Apunts Med Esport. 2016;51(190):37-39

1886-6581/$ - see front matter © 2015 Consell Català de l’Esport. Generalitat de Catalunya. Publicat per Elsevier España, S.L.U. Tots els drets reservats.

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* Corresponding author.E-mail: b.masdejesus@gmail.com (B. Mas).

EDITORIAL

The scientific production in sports medicine journals

Beatriz Mas*, José A. Mena and Alejandro Barragán

BIBLIOMETRICS-3MB, Scientific publications group, Barcelona, Spain

This editorial aims at analysing some relevant data related to scientific publication in sports medicine journals. In or-der to do so, a number of variables related to such scientific production have been retrieved from Scopus (Elsevier)1 da-tabase.

Figure 1 shows the number of articles of this speciality published within the last five years (2011-2015). In this case, we can observe that its number increased exponenti-ally until 2014 (from 3,636 articles published in 2011 to 5,213 articles published in 2014), and suffered a slight de-cline in 2015, when the number of yearly articles went down to 5,023.

Figure 2 offers a comparison between the 10 most prolific sports medicine journals. American Journal of Sports Medi-cine is in the first place, having published 1,699 papers du-ring the last five years.

Figure 3 presents a list of the ten institutions that have published more papers related to the speciality. The Uni-versity of Queensland is in the first place, having published 288 articles, and the Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Hos-pital is placed tenth in the list with 191 articles.

Figure 4 offers a list of the ten countries with the highest scientific production in sports medicine. The USA is in the first position (with 5,904 papers). Spain ranks seventh in the list, with 1,088 papers, ahead of Italy, Japan and Brazil.

Figure 5 shows the 10 languages mostly used by the pro-fessionals of this speciality. As it can be seen, English is the most used language (93.3 % of the papers). The rest of the languages have very little significance.

Figure 6 shows the sorts of articles that are most widely used when it comes to diffusing scientific knowledge about

Documents by year5500

5250

5000

4750

4500

4250

4000

3750

2011

2012 2013 2014 20153500

Figure 1 Number of published documents by year between 2011 and 2015. Source: Scopus1.

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2 B. Mas et al.

Figure 2 Most prolific sports medicine journals by year. Source: Scopus1.

Figure 3 Most prolific institutions publishing about sports medicine. Source: Scopus1.

Figure 4 Countries with the biggest scientific production in sports medicine. Source: Scopus1.

Documents per year by sourceCompare the document for up to 10 sources

400

350

300

250

200

150

2011

Doc

umen

ts

British journal of sports medicine Medicine and science in sports and exercise American journal of sports medicine

Sports medicineInternational journal of sports medicine

Journal of sports science and medicineScandinavian journal of medicine and science in sportsJournal of sports medicine and physical fitnessClinical journal of sport medicine

Journal of science and medicine in sport

2012 2013

Compare journals and view SJR, IPP, and SNIP data

51024102

100

50

0

Figura 2 Revistas de medicina del deporte que más artículos publican al ano. Tomada de Scopus1.

Documents by affiliationCompare the document counts for up to 15 affiliations

University of Queensland

Australian Institute of Sport

Loughborough University

Universidade de sao Paulo - usp

University of Western Australia

The University of Sydney

Liverpool John Moores University

Ohio State University

Auckland University of Technology

Aspetar Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Hospital

0 25 50 75 100 125 150 175

Documents200 225 250 275 300 325

Documents by country/territoryCompare the document counts for up to 15 countries/territories

United States

United Kingdom

Australia

Canada

Germany

France

Spain

Italy

0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500

Documents

4000 4500 5000 5500 6000 6500

Japan

Brazil

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The scientific production in sports medicine journals 3

this speciality. We can see that original papers are the most usual (77 %), followed by reviews (10.9%).

To sum up, we can affirm that the specialists in sports medicine are increasing their scientific production worldwi-de year after year, that the majority of such production is published in international magazines and by institutions from different countries. The USA is the country with the

1.7%1.5%

1.0%

9

0.8%0.7% 0.6%

Documents (%)

93.3%

0.3%0.05%0.05%

English

French

Spanish

Italian

Japanese

German

Croatian

Dutch

Catalan

Portuguese

Documents by type

Article in pres... (7.7%)

Review (10.9%)

Editorial (4.4%)

Article (77.0%)

Figure 5 Most used languages in sports medicine publishing. Source: adapted from Scopus1.

Figure 6 Most usual types of scientific documents in sports medicine. Source: Scopus1.

highest scientific production, and English is the most used language.

References1. Scopus (Elsevier) database. [consulted on 4th Apr 2016]. Availa-

ble at: http://www.scopus.com/

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