Top cited research over fifteen years in Sports Biomechanics

This study tested the hypothesis of the strong scholar perception of the journal Sports Biomechanics with a bibliometric analysis of top-cited articles. Three major databases, Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science, were searched for the most cited articles published in Sports Biomechanics for the first 15 years (2002-2016) of publication. The top 20 (4%) cited articles from each database were qualitatively analysed for research themes and descriptive statistics calculated for citations and citation rates. The top-cited articles published in Sports Biomechanics had high citation rates and included several citation classics, indicating strong contributions to the advancement of knowledge in applied biomechanics and beyond. The results support previous high ratings of the journal by sport and exercise biomechanics scholars and refute the biased and lower ranking based on the Web of Science Impact Factor. There was moderate (40-70%) agreement on the top 20 cited articles between the three databases due to differences in indexing and temporal coverage.