An analysis of e-literature on the game of cricket in sport sciences
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Date
2016-07-28
Authors
Kalidasan, R.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
Abstract
Introduction
Research and publications on a particular sport play a major role in its growth and development. Vigneshwaran (2015) viewed that “studying, analyzing and assessing published sports literature in particular area is not very common in the field of research. Such work will definitely document the various aspects including historical development of the sport, origin, growth & development of the sport, techniques, tactics, strategies, skill development, general & specific training, statistics, sport sciences, research influences, complete profiling of literature and so on.” Today Information scientists apply many techniques to assess publication on a particular area. In this respect, bibliometrics and scientometrics are popular methods used throughout the world. In the past few sports specific bibliometrics studies have been done on soccer, judo and rugby. (Vigneshwaran, 2015; Peset, 2013; Martin, et.al. 2013).
Cricket is a popular sport which is played in more than 108 countries around the globe. Literature on ‘Cricket’ is plenty and available in various forms. The main focus of this work is to study, assess, analyse and document the publication pattern on the game of Cricket from the electronic source. To analyse the literature on Cricket globally, many techniques are used by modern day scientists. As there are no major Scientometric and Bibliometric studies on analysing the publication outcome in the field of Cricket, the investigator was motivated to take-up this study.
The purpose of the study is to analyse the global literature on the game of Cricket in the area of ‘Sport Sciences’ which is available in the electronic form. It attempts to profile the literature on ‘Cricket’ under the following categories: the year-wise publications of literature on Cricket, country-wise distribution of publications, analyze the language-wise distribution of literature on Cricket, document the title-wise classification of literature on Cricket, list the top ten institutions with high productive literature on Cricket and the top ten contributing authors in Cricket publications.
Methodology
Bibliometrics research, which is a statistical analysi of scientific and technical literature, is adopted in this work. Bibliometrics analyses quantitative and qualitative data to describe publication patterns within a field of research. In the quantitative analysis, various parameters namely, year-wise distribution, country-wise distribution, language-wise distribution, title-wise distribution, institutions-wise distribution and author-wise distribution are systematically analyzed to measure and quantify the amount of literature and research output on Cricket during the study period.
The electronic database known as the Web of Science, which has a very strong coverage and mostly written in English, was used in this study. The data were retrieved from this database by using the search term ‘Cricket’ in ‘topic’ published in all the years and all types were analyzed. In all, 7,139 documents were found in Web of Science database from 1st January 1993 to 26st February, 2016. In order to narrow down the study the research areas option and selected the area ‘Sport Sciences’ were used. In all 355 documents were found and all were taken for final analysis as the sample.
In data collection, initially the researcher downloaded the bibliographical data in notepad files. The collected data were analyzed with the assistance of ‘Histcite Software’ for data classification and the unique data were rearranged in MS-Excel format to eliminate duplication from downloaded data. To cross check the data, with the assistance of analyse result option, the data for analyse were checked. Using the collected data, a Quantitative analysis was done. The results of the study were discussed broadly using illustrations in the form of diagram and table.
Results and Discussion
In all 355 documents were published on ‘Cricket’ under ‘Sport Sciences’ classifications, which was far less than for ‘Football’ under ‘Sport Sciences’ classifications (5,879 documents) in the database on the cut- off date. The maximum number of Cricket publications was in the year 2013 and triennial growth rate was observed after 2005 onwards. This study indicates that publications in Cricket were done in 29 countries and Australia tops the list with 180 publications, followed by England with 102 publications. Vigneshwaran et.al. (2014) observed that ‘86 countries have published at least one literature on Soccer’. The present result also reveals that out of 4 languages, English has 351 literatures and stood first among the source languages. ‘Journal of Sports Sciences’ has published maximum of 65 publications in Cricket. Vigneshwaran et.al. (2013) in their work documented ‘Journal of Strength and Conditioning’ has published maximum of 507 publications in Soccer. The result reveals that University of Western Australia had contributed a high number of literature in Cricket, followed by the University of Sydney. Most of the Australian Universities were among the top ten Universities that published on Cricket. Among all authors globally ‘Portus M’ has published 16 items in Cricket, followed by ‘Elliott B’ contributing 14 publications. From this study, it is evident that published work on ‘Cricket’ under ‘Sport Sciences’ classifications, was comparatively less than many other major sports played throughout the world.
Conclusion
Hence it was concluded that more works on Cricket should be encouraged internationally. To preserve the information and to enhance the research excellence globally, literature in Cricket should be in electronic form.
Description
Keywords
Sport Sciences , e-literature , Cricket
Citation
Proceedings of the International Conference on the Humanities and the Social Sciences (ICHSS) -2016 Faculty of Arts, University of Peradeniya. P.350-353