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REVIEW PAPER
Sports Carbon Emissions and Climate Change:
A Review Based on Citespace
1
School of Physical Education, Hunan University, Changsha, China
2
Ice and Snow Sports Institute, Shenyang Sport University, Shenyang, China
3
College of Sports Science, Qufu Normal University, Qufu, China
Submission date: 2025-01-09
Final revision date: 2025-05-15
Acceptance date: 2025-06-02
Online publication date: 2025-08-25
KEYWORDS
TOPICS
ABSTRACT
Based on Citespace software, this study conducted a bibliometric analysis of the current status
and evolutionary trends of research in the field of carbon emissions and climate change in sports
during the period 2008-2024. The study screened 445 relevant documents from the three major
databases of SSCI, A&HCI, and SCIE in the Web of Science Core Collection (WOS-CC), and
revealed the research dynamics in the field through visualization. The results show an overall upward
trend in the number of related research publications since 2008, especially in the last five years
(2020-2024), when the percentage of publications reached 52.13%, indicating that scholars’ attention
to this topic has increased significantly in recent years. At the institutional level, the National Institute
for Environmental Studies - Japan ranks first with 99 publications, and Japan has the largest number
of research collaborations in this field, amounting to 306, which reflects the importance Japan attaches
to environmental protection and its research strength in this field. In terms of discipline distribution,
the research is mainly concentrated in the field of environmental sciences, with 173 articles published,
accounting for 38.87% of the total number of articles, while the research in the field of physical education
and sports is relatively small, which suggests that the future research can strengthen interdisciplinary
cooperation, and incorporate multidisciplinary perspectives such as physical education and sports,
economics, and management, in order to enrich the content of the research. In addition, keyword
emergence analysis shows that “carbon footprint”, “scenarios”, “atmospheric methane”, “land use”,
and so on are the hotspots of current research, which reveal the emerging trends in the research of
carbon emission and climate change in sports trends. This study provides a bibliometric perspective
for systematically analyzing the relationship between sports carbon emissions and climate change,
and provides theoretical references and directions for future research, but it also has limitations such as
a shorter time span of the data and the lack of coverage of non-English publications, so subsequent
studies can further expand the scope of the data in order to enhance the systematicity and completeness
of the study.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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