Sizing up Sport History Journals: Metrics, Sport Humanities, and History

Abstract

Journals, and the articles they publish, make a significant contribution to the field of knowledge in the humanities. Journals in the humanities, like the sciences, are ranked through qualitative evaluations conducted by scholarly communities, national research assessments and expert panels, and they are also ranked through quantitative evaluations generated by bibliometrics (metrics) which often involves a complex mix of databases and algorithms. The use of metrics to evaluate journals, and more broadly to appraise scholars, in the humanities is contested terrain. The application of metrics as they apply to journals in sport history, sport humanities, and mainstream history mark disputed territory in these domains and require critical assessment. Using the Scopus database and three related metrics – SCImago Journal Rank, Source-Normalized Impact per Paper, and CiteScore – over a five-year period (2014–2018), Sport in History emerges as the premier sport history journal in two of these metrics. More significantly for sport history is that the field has three journals, Sport in History, The International Journal of the History of Sport, and the Journal of Sport History, that regularly rank in Quartile 1 (top twenty-five percent) journals in the discipline of history.