The 100 most-cited articles in soccer injuries: a bibliometric study

Abstract Bibliometric analysis is an increasingly popular method for assessing aspects of a specific field of research and identifying its emerging areas of interest. Although it has been increasingly used in sports medicine research to assess injuries, few studies have focused on soccer. The purpose of our study was to identify the 100 most-cited publications related to soccer injuries and conduct a thorough bibliometric mapping analysis to understand the research trends. Using the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Database and Bibliometrix R-package software, we identified 100 articles with 26,046 total citations (range = 146-945) published between 1990 and 2017. Most were published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (32 articles) and American Journal of Sports Medicine (31 articles), and most corresponding authors originated from Sweden. About half of the articles were descriptive or epidemiology studies using level-2 evidence. The main research topics were epidemiology (25 articles) and prevention (24 articles). Most focused on male and adult elite soccer players.