Quantitative Analysis of Global Literature on the Game of Basketball in Sport Sciences

Abstract

The growth and development of any sport largely depends upon several aspects. Research and publications on a particular sport play a major role in the growth and development of that game. Today Information scientists are applying very many techniques to assess the publication on a particular area. The bibliometrics and scientometrics are popular methods used throughout the world to assess the publication on a particular area. Basketball is considered to be the second most popular international sport in the world. Literature on ‘Basketball’ is plenty, which is available in various forms. The main focus of this work is to study, assess, analyse and further to document the publication pattern on the game of Basketball from the electronic source. The purpose of the present study was to analyse the global literature on the game of Basketball in the research area of ‘Sport Sciences’ which was available in the electronic form. In the quantitative analysis, various parameters namely, year-wise distribution, country-wise distribution, language-wise distribution, title-wise distribution, institutions-wise distribution and author-wise distribution were systematically analysed. This would enable the researcher to measure and quantify the amount of literature and research output on Basketball game during the study period. The data for this study were retrieved from the ‘Web of Science’ database by using search string the term ‘Basket ball’ in ‘topic’ published in all the years and all types were analyzed. In all, 5,729 documents were found in Web of Science database from 1st January 1989 to 21st August 2016. In order to narrow down the study the researchers used the ‘research area’ option and selected the area ‘Sport Sciences’. Overall 2,819 documents were taken for final analysis.In data collection, initially the researchers had downloaded the bibliographical data in the format of notepad files. The collected data were analyzed with the assistance of ‘Histcite Software’ for data classification and finally, the unique data are rearranged in MS-Excel format to eliminate duplication from downloaded data. To cross check the data, with the assistance of ‘analyse result’ option, the data for analyse were checked. Using the collected data, the Quantitative analysis was done. Using illustrations in the form of diagram, the result of the study was discussed broadly in the paper.