Sports activities during the Covid 19 pandemic: A Bibliometric Analysis

. The sports industry has been one of the most negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. This bibliometric analysis aims to analyze the characteristics of the literature on sports activities during COVID-19 published in the Scopus database. Year of publication, type of publication, publication stage, language, country, institution, scientific source, author, and keywords are used as parameters in the analysis of sports activities and Covid-19. A thorough examination of 1480 documents from 2020 to 2023 (as of June 23, 2022) revealed four were issued and 1476 were analysed. According to the findings, the most publications occurred in 2021, with 805 documents. States became the most active country with a total of 302 documents. With 160 documents, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health was the most productive scientific source. The most common type of article documents (n = 1,116, 75,61%) Publication status: final (n = 1374, 93.08%). Most types of sources are journals (n = 1,449, 98.17%). There is a wide gap in the productivity of publications in the field of sports activities during the COVID-19 pandemic between countries with strong and large sports traditions and countries with developing sports traditions.


INTRODUCTION
Flexible strategies are required to enhance the general public's physical, mental, and emotional health in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. People should be able to participate in sports while maintaining a suitable distance from others and the adaptability to deal with changing situations and personal demands. (Lee et al., 2022). Numerous sports leagues are already taking action to halt the COVID-19 outbreak, which includes delaying or canceling sporting events (Parnell, et al., 2020). The COVID-19-related regulations have had a particularly detrimental effect on the sports business. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics and other sporting events of all sizes and interests have been postponed or canceled as a result of COVID-19, causing financial losses and unhappiness within the athlete community (Musumeci, 2022).
The closing of gyms, stadiums, swimming pools, dancing and fitness studios, physiotherapy clinics, parks, and playgrounds as a result of the global COVID-19 outbreak has a negative financial impact on people's ability and desire to exercise (Harangi-Rákos et al., 2022). The COVID-19 pandemic's effects have shown the sports system's flaws as well as its potential and benefits (Andrés, 2020). Physical activity, exercise, and COVID-19 have a pretty straight forward association (de Arajo, 2021), depending on personal intentions and efforts to meet physical needs. With the overarching goals of sport providing peace, wonderful lifestyles, and the impact of sport on the nation's economy, sport development faces challenges in the areas of sports policy, sports funding, and sports infrastructure, all of which are essential for sustainable sports (Oluwatoyin, et al., 2021). One of the biggest endeavors in human history is sport. Sport can also be utilized to show the rest of the world the advantages of cooperation between individuals and groups .
The prevalence of sports activities that did not adhere to worldwide age requirements was 27.5 percent (95 percent confidence interval 25.0-32.2) in 2016, according to 358 surveys conducted in 168 countries with 1.9 million participants (Gulthod, et al., 2018). The number of people who have never exercised has dramatically increased, according to a cross-sector representative survey about the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in Hungary. Prior to the pandemic, the percentage was 64.17 %, but after the first wave, it increased to 78.33 % (Ács et al., 2020); during the second wave, it was 73.67% (Harangi-Rákos, et al., 2022).
According to what we know, there is a gap in our comprehension of the literature on sports activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. In journals with a Scopus index, there are numerous studies on exercise and COVID-19. Understanding the shifting trends in published research in this domain brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic is the first step in building research capacity on exercise activity. Based on the year of publication, type of publication, stage of publication, language used, country of publication, institutions, scientific sources, author, and keywords from sports activities and Covid-19, this study seeks to analyze the characteristics of the literature on sports activities during COVID-19. The findings of this study can be utilized as basic data to conserve and promote other research activities and publications connected to sports activities given the current unclear environmental conditions, where it is expected that the infectious disease Covid-19 will continue to spread.

METHODOLOGY Data collection and retrieval
The primary goal of this bibliometric analysis is to examine the distribution of publications about sports activities during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Scopus database. The inquiry was finished in the context of descriptive analysis using the document inspection approach in the Scopus database. To access the Scopus database for this bibliometric analysis, keyword searches with the terms: TITLE ("sport" OR "physical activity" OR "physical exercise" OR "physical training" AND "COVID-19" OR "Coronavirus" OR "2019-nCoV" OR "SARS-CoV-2"). The records were 1480 records that were extracted from the Scopus database on June 23, 2022. The number of publications starts from 2020-2023. The Scopus database was chosen because it contains more documents than the Web of Science and Pubmed (Sweileh et al., 2017). This bibliometric analysis uses data in Comma-Separated Values (CSV) format for VOSviewer and Research Information Systems (RIS) for Publish or Perish, which is then exported to Microsoft Excel (Abdullah, 2021). The information gathered comprises the author's name, the source of the document, the publication's year and title, its scientific source, the subject matter, and the format of the publication. These guidelines ensure that the type of publishing selected will successfully gather trustworthy and accurate data in order to meet the study objectives (Abdullah & Sofyan, 2022).
The amounts of metadata that must be met for analysis varies greatly in bibliometric analysis (Sofyan, 2022). The minimum and maximum metadata standards that can be analyzed, as well as the quantity of metadata numbers for bibliometric analysis, are not stated. Each document requires the same total amount of papers to be fetched, and each paper can only be chosen once. 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1,000, and 2000 are the paper sample sizes (Rogers et al., 2020). To analyze bibliometrics, a minimum of 50 documents is required (Bornmann et al., 2014;Lehmann et al., 2008;Sjöstedt et al., 2015); 50-100 documents (Glänzel & Moed, 2012;Seglen, 1994;100-300 documents (Snyder, 2019). The number of validated publications is anticipated to reach a minimum threshold of 300 papers in order to conduct a bibliometric analysis, and this study has satisfied the minimal requirements (Donthu et al., 2021). This indicates that it doesn't have any special metadata linked to it. In this study, 1476 records were deemed sufficient to conduct a bibliometric analysis on the subject of sports activity.

Data analysis
1476 articles on sports-related topics were found between 2020 and 2023. This review was initially exported in Comma-separated Values (CSV) and Research Information Systems (RIS) formats to Microsoft Excel, Publish or Perish (PoP), and VOSviewer software for additional analysis. The data collected includes the author's name, the source of the document, the publishing year and title, the country, the journal, the subject matter, and the type of publication. The bibliometric analysis and mapping of articles on sports activities is possible with the Van Eck & Waltman tool (2010), VOSviewer. Van Eck and Waltman (2010; 2019) claim that VOSviewer transforms CSV data to diagrams or clusters using visual cues based on a mapping procedure.

Most Active Source Scientific
The top ten active journals with sports and COVID-19 papers are listed in

Most Active Countries and Institutions
It has also been determined how much the nation contributed to the global research of sporting events during the COVID-19 epidemic. Table 2 lists 63 of the 124 most active nations along with the minimum number of papers that each nation owns. With 302 articles and 5633 citations, the United States contributed the most to the overall number of publications. With 211, 136, and 3833 papers, respectively, the United Kingdom and Spain came in second and third in the analysis of sports activities during the COVID-19 epidemic. 3662 references. Figure 1 also provides descriptions of additional nations.

Author keywords
There are a total of 2776 keywords recorded in VOSviewer. Table 5 lists the 48 most frequently used keywords in sports activities abstracts during COVID-19. The keyword that came up the most was "Covid-19", which appeared 877 times and had a total link strength of 1569. Physical activity and exercise became the second and third most frequent keywords, with 536,180 times and 1158,394 total link strength. Figure 3 contains additional keywords from the VOSviewer output.

Author Citation
There are a total of 6625 authors recorded in VOSviewer, and 64 authors were found with a minimum of five published documents and at least one citation obtained. Figure 4 illustrates the citation author visualization network. Smith, I, with a total of 18 documents published, received 858 citations as the author with the highest number of citations on sports activities publications during the COVID-19 pandemic and a total link strength of 113.  Our society is currently experiencing the worst public health crisis in more than a century as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Global governments are stepping in to break the virus's chain of transmission and stop the spread of illness by imposing lockdowns on the general populace and quarantining positive people. Managing COVID-19 is challenging due to the complex interplay between its biological and sociological components, as we have learned from experience. Society has been forever changed by this pandemic. Particularly affected are sports (Leng & Phua, 2020). The pandemic has not only forced the cancellation or postponement of numerous sporting events, but it has also shown that sports organizations' internal procedures need to be reviewed (Parnell, et al., 2020).
Switzerland is the nation with the greatest number of scientific resources, the nation with the highest volume of publications in the area of sporting activities, and the nation with the top three suppliers of scientific resources in this area. With 302 documents and 5,633 citations, the United States rose to the position of nation with the most documents and citations.

CONCLUSION
The characteristics and trends of the literature on sports activities during the COVID-19 pandemic, published on Scopus up until June 23, 2022, are revealed by this bibliometric analysis. The publishing nations are those in North America, Europe, and those with long and storied histories in sports. During the COVID-19 pandemic, sports publications dominated. There are no publications by the principal author associated with organizations in nations with a weak history of growing sports. To boost global research productivity in the area of sports activity, research capacity must be built as well as supporting measures to encourage research productivity in nations with modest and developing sports activity traditions.
There are various restrictions on this study. One database is all we have. It is possible to use other databases, which might be able to contain more documents than Scopus, including PubMed, Google Scholar, or Web of Science (WoS). Because Scopus publishes papers in journals with high impact factors, we favor it.