Abstract
In China, since the beginning of the 21st century, the study of sports communication has gradually attracted the attention of the academic community, and a number of valuable achievements have emerged. The 2,863 articles that were published by core journals of sport communication from 1982 to 2018 and collected from the CNKI database were chosen as research objects. This article used CitespaceV software to analyze productivity, hot domains, and frontiers in China sport communication research by the methods of bibliometrics method, co-occurrence analysis, and word of frequency analysis. We aimed to grasp the dynamic process of China sport communication research development and provide a valuable reference for its theoretical research and practice. It was shown that first, sport communication researches in China started late but grew fast. Second, the research hotspot of sport communication was related to communication, culture, big data, network, and so on. Third, sport communication research was mainly carried out by universities of sport and communication schools of colleges and universities. Researches were centered around pluralistic, international, and technological aspects with “sport communication” as the focus in drawing experiences from the international sports communication and improve the Chinese sport communication. Rich knowledge and innovative ideas were needed to do the future researches.
Highlights
In the 1930s, with the birth of television, the relationship between sports and the media became increasingly close
We demonstrate a scientometric approach and use CiteSpaceV to delineate the structure and dynamics of the sports communication research
Each article indexed by the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) is assigned one or more subject categories
Summary
In the 1930s, with the birth of television, the relationship between sports and the media became increasingly close. With the rise of sports sociology, physical education, mass sports and other disciplines, sports and communication, sports and media gradually entered academic research. Both communication in sport and communication of sport in China is a rapidly growing and fast-moving interdisciplinary field of study, involving from mostly media sports to holistic sport communication studies, from quantitative studies to multi-channel and multi-method studies, from classic communication studies paradigms to interdisciplinary studies paradigms of humanities and social science as a whole, from studies mainly on text-mediated communication to research on visual-mediated communication, from traditional media studies to new media studies. Pedersen et al (2016) acclaimed that the study of sport communication has long been affiliated (and often intertwined) with the academic aspects of sports management. The term sport communication is a more encompassing title for both this specific field of the sport industry and the associated academic discipline. Sport communication is the most commonly used term for the field in the discipline of sport management
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