Bibliometric Analysis of High-Performance Athletes During Covid-19 Pandemic: From Citation Mapping to Research Agenda

The literature on high-performance athletes has developed in a not-so-considerable way in the last two years, in the same way, few productions of a systematic review of the literature are evidenced, as well as no study has been examined under the use of the technique of citation mapping called: bibliometrics. Therefore, it is the first time that this study is performed by means of scientific mapping and bibliometric analysis having a total of 130 documents published in different databases such as Scopus, PubMed, and Web of Science; the cut of years that were considered for this research was 2019–2022 since the period where the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread worldwide, causing several collateral effects in athletes with high performance around the world. For the analysis of the obtained data and mapping preparation, the VoS Viewer software, the lens.org bibliometric platform is implemented. The results of the scientific mapping, bibliometric clustering and co-occurrence networks have allowed the identification of possible fields of research that can be developed in the future. The results show that the literature on the high performance of athletes during the Covid-19 pandemic has advanced over these 4 years, as well as the most influential parts of the literature in terms of authors, scientific production, most cited topics, and keywords are related and from which lines of research can be innovated. Finally, there is no review of the literature regarding the collateral effects produced by Covid-19, which is why a line of research focused on biomechanical studies and collateral effects should be focused on.