Topics and trends: 30 years of sociology of sport

Abstract

What is and was the sociology of sports all about? Through the method of topic modelling, I will investigate the content of all articles (full text, N ¼ 1923) from what has historically been the three leading sociology of sport journals-Sociology of Sport Journal, International Review for the Sociology of Sport and Journal of Sport and Social Issuesfrom 1984 to 2014. The study extracts 20 dominant topics: from the vague but central topic of Culture via Organization & Politics, Gender, Race, and Body to the less central, but more specific, topic of Football, Nationalism and Globalization. Additionally, I look at how the three journals have their strongholds in these topics, and how the topics have fluctuated over time. The results are discussed against the background of previous reviews and studies in the sociology of sports.

A mapping of JLASSS: The academic consolidation of the socio-cultural studies of sport in Latin America

“…Reflection means that only one journal’s panorama has been provided in this paper and thus cannot represent the whole spectrum of research on sport that is based on the social and human sciences in Latin America. In addition, such strong statements rely on the challenge of gathering valid and reliable data, which was already highlighted by Seippel (2018) when addressing the difficult task of reading all the available content of an area such as the sociology of sport.…”

A state of affairs of European criminology: An exploration of topics and trends through topic modelling

“…In addition to the word probabilities associated to each topic, the model returns the prevalence of each topic. To be able to interpret the topics generated by the algorithm and to be able to discern meaningful topics from meaningless ones, researchers should have affinity with the phenomena under investigation (Seippel, 2018). In this way, this automated approach to text analysis results in high levels of substantive interpretability and allows researchers to analyse large collections of text by identifying central themes in the corpus (DiMaggio et al, 2013).…”

Scientometric Evaluation of Sports Journals in Russia

“…The relevance of the study is to consider the performance of Russian journals on the subject of "Physical Culture and Sports" and evaluate their ability to achieve the results of the journals included in the Web of Science and Scopus database. The large 30-year world history of the development of the sports scientific field explains the need for its further development in conjunction with other branches of knowledge, including from a geographical point of view [3].…”