Citations Network Analysis of Vision and Sport

Background: Sports vision is a relatively new specialty, which has attracted particular interest in recent years from trainers and athletes, who are looking at ways of improving their visual skills to attain better performance on the field of play. The objective of this study was to use citation networks to analyze the relationships between the different publications and authors, as well as to identify the different areas of research and determine the most cited publication. Methods: The search for publications was carried out in the Web of Science database, using the terms “sport”, “vision”, and “eye” for the period between 1911 and August 2020. The publication analysis was performed using the Citation Network Explorer and CiteSpace software. Results: In total, 635 publications and 801 citations were found across the network, with 2019 being the year with the highest number of publications. The most cited publication was published in 2002 by Williams et al. By using the clustering functionality, four groups covering the different research areas in this field were found: ocular lesion, visual training methods and efficiency, visual fixation training, and concussions. Conclusions: The citation network offers an objective and comprehensive analysis of the main papers on sports vision.