Bibliometric analysis of swimming publications in sports science: a medical perspective

Abstract

Objective: Although the number of global studies on swimming has increased, there are still no bibliometric studies in the literature. This study aimed to present a medical perspective by examining scientific articles published in the field of swimming sports with statistical methods.
 
 Material and Method: Articles on swimming published between 1980 and 2021 were obtained from the Web of Science database. Spearman's correlation coefficient was used for correlation analysis. Network visualization maps were used to identify trending topics.
 
 Results: A total of 21732 publications were found. 2392 (70.5%) of these publications were articles. The top 3 contributing countries to the literature were USA (462, 19.3%), UK (331, 10.4), and Australia (298, 12.1%). The top 2 most active institutions were Universidade Do Porto (n=93), and Australian Institute of Sport (n=82). The most active journals with the highest number of articles were International Journal of Sports Medicine (n=171), and Journal of Sports Sciences (n=150). According to the average number of citations per article, the top most influential journal was Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology (citation: 51.8).
 
 Conclusion: The most studied subjects related to medicine and health in swimming were blood lactate, heart rate, fatigue, shoulder, body composition, anthropometry, oxygen uptake, oxidative stress, disability, energy cost, electromyography, oxygen consumption, physiology, motivation, physical activity, aging, muscle strength, shoulder pain, testosterone, core temperature, and stress. General topics studied in recent years were athletic performance, physiology, stress, strength, disability, paralympic, electromyography, youth, shoulder pain, sports, force, competition, kinetics, adolescent, sport, swimming training, and aging.