Objectives: To conduct a comprehensive mapping analysis to the scientific literature published in football aiming to identify the areas of bigger interest and potential for further exploration.
Methods: The data were obtained by a search conducted on the Web of Science. Articles were listed based on citation frequency. We used an open-source bibliometrix R-package for the comprehensive bibliometric analyses.
Results: The number of citations per article ranged from 251 to 869 (median 323; IQR 125). The yearly number of citations ranged from 8 to 54 (median 26; IQR 11). Most of the articles (76%) were of level III of evidence, 10% were level II and 14% were level IV. Within the top 50 most-cited articles, 40 articles were original research (37 observational and 3 experimental studies), 9 were review articles and 1 was a thesis. From the 40 original research articles, 50% involved elite players, 73% were exclusive to male players and 80% involved adult players only. The topic area with the highest number of articles was sports medicine (44%), followed by training and testing (32%), performance analysis (14%) and physiology (10%). No study within the top 50 was devoted to biomechanics, nutrition, sport psychology, coaching or social sciences.
Conclusions: The lack of experimental studies within the top 50 most-cited articles in football clearly underpins how far we still are from establishing the theoretical and methodological guidelines for the applied science and medicine in football.
Keywords: bibliometric analyses; citations; soccer.