What is on the Journal of Sport Management? The most popular topics and contexts in the last decade

Abstract

Despite a relatively short history, sport management has been recognized as a rapidly growing discipline (Chalip, 2006; Costa, 2005; Quatman & Chelladurai, 2007). Being a "young discipline"(Costa, 2005, p. 118), sport management has been building its platform for the further development as a unique discipline. Meanwhile, sport management has borrowed its theories and methodologies from other mother disciplines such as sociology, business management, marketing, psychology, etc (Zanger & Groves, 1994), which was referred as a derivative model (Chalip, 2006). The purpose of this study is to identify what kinds of sub-disciplines have been studied to date by analyzing published research articles in sport management. For this study, Journal of Sport Management was chosen based on a couple of reasons. First, it has been the oldest academic journal in the sport management discipline. Second, it is currently the only one journal in the sport management field that has been listed in Science Citation Index (SCI) which includes the world’s leading scientific journals. Two researchers coded 158 articles independently based on the four determined criteria. The inter-coder reliability for the sub-discipline was as high as 97%. A total of 158 research papers were classified into the eight different sub-disciplines. Sport management related research papers comprised 36%, which was followed by sport marketing (26.6%), sport economics (12.7%), and sport ethics (11.4%), etc. Sport management and sport marketing sub-disciplines were dominant comprising 62.6% of the total research papers in the JSM in the last decade. Detailed classification is presented and discussed.