Does Scientific Productivity Influence Athletic Performance? An Analysis of Countries' Performances in Sciences, Sport Sciences and Olympic Games

Physical Education being applied in nature, the role of scientific research has been widely challenged in this field. Applying a bibliometric analysis method, the present study tries to investigate scientific achievement in sports and exercises and examine its relation to practical performance, using scholarly papers indexed in ISI as substitutes of scientific productivity and medals won in olympic competitions for representations of athletic performance. The results showed that Sport Sciences is a small scientific community with a limited body of literature but a great number of contributing countries. The counts of sports scientific publications revealed to be exponentially increasing, signifying a stable annual growth comparable to that of the global science system. There is also a significant correlation between countries' success in olympic games and their scientific productivity. However, the former is found to have no significant correlation with the counts of sports-specific publications. It implies that though the scientific productivity in sports have no direct effect on athletes' performance in olympic games, the overall development of countries determine their performance in competitions. Consequently, to reach superiority in sports a complete evolution in all aspects of science, sports, economy and human development is necessary.