Discovering directions in sports sociology research: a brief bibliometric analysis

This study aimed to investigate the representation of editorial patterns and the evolution of academic discourse in sports sociology publications. This study relies on the Scopus and WoS databases to compile publications on the sociology of sport. In this study, ScientPy and VOSviewer were fervently used to build scientific mapping and visualization networks in an instant. There were 516 publications in the Scopus database, while 216 were in WoS. Thus, the total number of publications between 1990 and 2022 was 732, or 79.13% of the total. The first two countries, with more than 100 publications each, are the United States and Germany. The keyword “sociology of sport” is closely associated with “development”, “athlete” and “physical education”, which has emerged significantly since 2015. This study should pave the way for future initiatives to improve and stimulate research in sociology of sport. sport. Therefore, sports sociologists should be concerned with new knowledge, such as the relationship between the sociology of sports and mental health, gender disparities, sports injury care, and artificial intelligence. Interestingly, the social components of physical education and sports training are important for daily human activities, behavior, and emotions. Keywords: Sociology of sport, Physical Education, Sports, Bibliometrics.