From silos to a unified field? Mapping academic production in sport for development

Abstract

In the last decade, the field of sport for development (SFD) has continued its impressive growth, including as it relates to academic output. This output, however, has not come without criticism. In particular, concerns have been raised about the quality of evidence presented, the dominance of the Global North within SFD research, and the apparent lack of transdisciplinary cooperation in the field. In the following, we take a specific interest in the last two points and use a bibliometric analysis of SFD literature to identify authorship, disciplinary and thematic patterns within this work. Overall, our results show that SFD is still a highly Northern-led field and this is reinforced by several small, highly productive, self-referential authorship consortia. In light of this, we critically assess these trends and reiterate a number of recommendations to enhance disciplinary and international collaboration in SFD.

Keywords:

• Bibliometrics
• sport for development
• academia
• research

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the attendees at the 2022 World Congress of Sociology of Sport for their feedback on a preliminary version of the data and analysis presented in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We do not want to engage in a process of ‘naming and shaming’ and, therefore, have opted against providing the references for these articles.