The sociology of sport has become a burgeoning subdiscipline in the 21st century. To assess knowledge domains and the status quo of the field in Europe and North America, this study uses CiteSpace (a bibliometric visualization software) to analyse 870 academic articles published in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Journal of Sport & Social Issues and Sociology of Sport Journal from 2008 to 2018. By mapping/examining core contributors, keywords, high citations/cited authors, major clusters and citation bursts, the findings echo John W. Loy’s ‘risk of critical mass’ calling for various citation analysis approaches. The study expands Jon Dart and Ørnulf Seippel’s recent topic model studies on subdisciplinary development in recent decades, contributing to informed discussions of geographical politics and research directions in the field. The scale and scope of this analysis is highly generalizable to assess pre-existing state-of-the-art research on the sociology of sport.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.