Scientific mapping of the state-of-the-art in padel. A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Padel has become one of the most popular racket sports in the world, capturing the interest of researchers and thus increasing the number of manuscripts that revolve around this sport. This article describes the state of development of the science of padel and locates the most relevant journals, authors, institutions, countries and keywords on the subject. The set of publications related to padel was retrieved from the main collection of the Web of Science. The state of development of padel in science was verified. Journals, authors, institutions, countries and keywords in the topic were analysed with the VOSviewer software. A total of 116 publications were analysed, finding that the publications on padel were in a phase of exponential growth. Sánchez-Alcaraz, Courel-Ibañez, Muñoz-Marín, Ramón-Llin and Sánchez-Pay were the most prominent authors, with the University of Murcia and Spain being the main institution and country on the subject. The science of padel is growing exponentially, with Spain being the driving force behind the topic of study, with new countries joining in recent years. This study provides relevant information on the state-of-the-art padel, and it will help researchers to establish new relationships and find more relevant authors and articles.

Decoding the decade: Analyzing the evolution of technical and tactical performance in elite padel tennis (2011–2021)

“…In terms of evolution of the game style, the effective playing time increased by 17.5% between 2011 and 2016, followed by a decrease of 14.6% between 2016 and 2021. While the initial increase can be attributed to enhanced technical skills and increased tactical awareness developed during the period of significant padel growth in Spain, 7 the subsequent decline between 2016 and 2021 might be linked to a greater emphasis on physical preparation (e.g. overall enhancement of physical fitness, increased conditioning training, speed, explosiveness) and athletic conditioning (e.g.…”

“…from 2007 to 2022). 7 The increasing knowledge included technical and tactical performance, anthropometric, biomechanical, and physiological characteristics, as well as psychological features of the game. 8 Performance analysis emerged as the foremost area of interest, accounting for over 50% of the papers.…”

“…8 Performance analysis emerged as the foremost area of interest, accounting for over 50% of the papers. 7 More specifically, papers focused on technical and tactical performance analysis are also the most cited ones, especially in professional and elite players, both males and females, 2,9 probably because the definition of the performance profile is primarily important and of reference for practical training applications. Subsequently, approximately 25% of the publications examined psycho-physical and mental performance in the context of padel.…”

Evolución de los documentos relacionados con la Inclusión Educativa en el área de Educación Física (Evolution of the Documents Related to the Inclusive Education in Physical Education)

“…Nuevas Tendencias en Educación Física Deporte y Recreación" (Factor de Impacto: 1.3 y Cuartil: N/A). Por tanto, la revisión bibliométrica permite identificar y evaluar tendencias y patrones de investigación (Denche-Zamorano et al, 2023;Gamonales et al, 2023;Hernández-Beltrán, González-Coto et al, 2023), así como información relevante para los investigadores sobre dónde enviar sus trabajos. Por ello, se recomienda previamente realizar una revisión bibliométrica a los investigadores de cualquier disciplina con la finalidad de conocer los principales hallazgos relacionados con la temática objeto de estudio.…”

“…Para la búsqueda de los documentos, se empleó la base de datos Web of Science (WoS), puesto que es una de las bases de datos que mayor uso presenta para la elaboración de las revisiones bibliométricas (Denche-Zamorano et al, 2023;Gamonales et al, 2023;. La elección de esta base de datos permite estandarizar y recopilar la información relativa a una temática de investigación específica (Herrera & de las Heras-Rosas, 2020), evitando y reduciendo la duplicidad de información, puesto que el 95%-99% de los documentos identificados en la WoS se han reconocido en la base de datos Scopus (Singh et al, 2021).…”