Characteristics of international collaboration in sport sciences publications and its influence on citation impact

Background: Some bibliometric research has been carried out in sport sciences, but compared with other disciplines there is still no intensive study at macro level, especially on international collaboration. Aim: This study attempts to observe the status and trend of international collaboration in sport sciences at macro level, and to look at its relationship with academic impact. Methods: 20804 publications from 63 consistently issued journals belonging to the Sport Sciences category in Web of Science database in 2000–2001 & 2010–2011 were analyzed. The main objects include co-authorship links of country pairs, the share of international co-authored publications, tendency and “affinity” in collaboration, and citation impact of international publications. Differences between countries and periods were observed. Results: There is a rapid increase of the share of international collaboration in sport sciences. In some countries the share is even above 2/3; Co-authorship networks imply some cultural, political or geographical factors for collaboration, and their changes exhibit some new trends; Selected countries have strong tendency in collaboration; International collaborated publications have a higher performance than domestic ones in citation impact. But gaps between countries are narrowing. Conclusions: International collaboration really intensified in this field. European, especially Nordic countries are very fond of collaboration and have gained outstanding performance as a partner. It is meaningful to further explore the underlying motivation behind international collaboration in sport science research.