Sport and exercise psychology research from the Asian and South Pacific region: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Given that the Asian-South Pacific Association of Sport Psychology has recently passed 30 years since its creation, it would be interesting to examine the pattern of scientific publications of researchers from the Asian and South Pacific region over that period. This bibliometric analysis summarizes and analyses sport and exercise psychology publications from the region from the establishment of the Association in 1989 to the present. We conducted a systematic search of publications authored by researchers from the Asian and South Pacific region in nine sport and exercise psychology journals indexed in the Web of Science from 1989 to 2020. We analysed overall trends, the most prominent authors in terms of number of publications and citations, keywords as a reflection of noteworthy topics, and maps representing co-authorship, country, and institution clusters. Of the total of 1,003 publications, more than half were published after 2012. The most prolific authors with at least 30 publications each were James A. Dimmock, Ben Jackson, and Daniel F. Gucciardi who are all affiliated to Australian universities. Authors of the top 10 most cited publications are affiliated to Australian, New Zealand, and Singapore universities. The universities with the most publications were from Australia (University of Western Australia, University of Queensland, Curtin University, Victoria University, University of Wollongong, and Australian Catholic University), Hong Kong (University of Hong Kong), New Zealand (University of Otago), Singapore (Nanyang Technological University), and Taiwan (National Taiwan Sport University). There is co-authorship between countries in the Asian and South Pacific region as well as outside the region. Most of the collaborations outside the region were with the USA and England.