Hamstring Rehabilitation Scholarship

A Bibliometric Analysis of Themes, Authors and Countries.

Abstract

Hamstring injuries are one of the most common lower limb injuries found in sport and this study illustrates the utility of bibliometric analysis in examining a topic from a strength and conditioning coach perspective.

This study identifies key areas of scholarship relating to the rehabilitation of hamstring injury among athletes and compares this with the total corpus of literature on the topic.  A range of bibliometric measures are used that entail multi-dimensional scaling to identify clusters of related themes, authors, countries, and journals central to the evolution of the evidential-base.

A corpus of 2439 articles on hamstring rehabilitation were retrieved and of these 815 papers relating to hamstring rehabilitation and athletes. Indexed research on the topic commenced in the early 1980s and has expanded at an exponential rate since then. Key authors (Dr J.I. Tol and Dr D.A. OPAR) and prolific countries (USA, Australia, and UK) have been identified. Examination of journal sources reveals that scholarship on this topic conforms to Bradford’s law of scattering and a total of 7 journals forms the core of published work in this space - British Journal of Sports Medicine; American Journal of Sports Medicine; Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sport; Sports Medicine; Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy; and Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. 

This study demonstrates the utility of bibliometric analysis in identifying areas of significant importance to strength and conditioning coaches, documents prolific authors, and highlights countries that dominate knowledge development.  Neophyte practitioners can use these findings to seek out collaborative partners, pursue under-researched areas of inquiry and target their work for publication at relevant journals adding to the evidential-base.