Big Data in Sports: A Bibliometric and Topic Study

Background: The development of the sports industry was impacted by the era of Big Data due to the rapid growth of information technology. Unfortunately, that has become an increasingly challenging Issue.

Objectives: The purpose of the research was to analyze the scientific production of Big Data in sports and sports-related activities in two databases, Web of Science and Scopus.

Methods/Approach: Bibliometric analysis and topic mining were done on 51 articles selected after four exclusion criteria (written in English, journal articles, the final stage of publication, and a detailed review of all full texts). The software tool used was Statistica Data Miner.

Results: We found that the first articles appeared in Scopus in 2013 and WoS in 2014. USA and China are countries which produced the most articles. The most common research areas in WoS and Scopus are Public environmental and occupational health, Medicine, Environmental science ecology, and Engineering.

Conclusions: We conducted that further research and literature review will be required as this is a broad and new topic.