Bibliometric Profile of Research on Physical Activities in Special Education

Abstract

The aim of the research is to understand the bibliometric profile of physical activity research in special education. The researchers first decided on the database to be searched. Then, keywords were determined and the data were converted into a form suitable for analysis. Then, data analysis was carried out. As a result of the research, a series of keywords were decided to ensure that publications containing research on physical activity in special education were included: "(AB=("special education")) AND AB=("sport" or "physical activity" or "exercise") In the first search, 255 articles were reached. After excluding the excluded articles, 137 articles were analysed. Using the restriction options of the WoS database, the search was restricted to consist only of articles and to be between 1992 and 2024. Articles and early access were selected and all languages were selected as the language of publication. VOSviewer, Microsoft Excel 2016 and the open source Biblioshiny package program created in R programming language for bibliometric analyses were used in the analysis of the research data. In this study, the number of publications was taken into account to determine the effective journals in the field, and the number of local and global citations was evaluated to determine the effective publications. In order to evaluate the historical development of research on physical activity in special education, the frequency of publication by years was used. Likewise, in order to determine the publication efficiency of the countries, the number of publications of the relevant authors according to their countries was evaluated. Common word analyses and strategic diagrams were used to identify thematic research areas.