ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. Sports Politics, Policy and Law
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fspor.2025.1489652
This article is part of the Research TopicInsights in Sports Politics, Policy and LawView all 9 articles
For a New World Ranking of Countries in Elite Sport -Correlation Between Competition Level and Bibliometrics in Summer Olympic Sports
Provisionally accepted
- 1Notre Dame University – Louaize, Zouk Mosbeh, Lebanon
- 2Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland
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Introduction -George Orwell defined international sport as "a war minus the shooting". Sport is therefore here to reproduce the geopolitical competitions between countries, in a friendly environment. The Olympics remain today the largest multidisciplinary sports competition in the world, and the Olympic Medal Table has been dogmatically followed by media, scholars, and sports administrators, as the mainstream measurement of the countries' success in elite sport. Methods -Since 2018, the Olympic Medal Table has been challenged by a global sport scientific index, the World Ranking of Countries in Elite Sport (WRCES), which provided, for the first time, a research-based measurement of the performance of all the countries having National Olympic Committees. The main characteristics of the WRCES is a weighting of each sport determining its level of competition. This coefficient is the sum of two variables, one related to the universality and the other to the global media popularity of each sport. In this paper, correlations calculi, using Pearson R coefficient of correlation along with the corresponding P value, will be conducted between the number of citations, number of articles, WRCES level of competition and the number of medals of each Olympic sport. Results -There is a strong correlation between the number of scientific citations (R = 0.74; p < 0.001) or articles (R = 0.70; p < 0.001) and the competition level determined by the WRCES while no relationship was found with the number of medals available at the Summer Olympics. Discussion -Overall, the present study confirms the relevance of the WRCES and adds an argument to contest the rationality of the Olympic Medal program.
Keywords: Olympics, Sports, ranking, Bibliometrics, scientific
Received: 01 Sep 2024; Accepted: 22 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Nassif and Millet. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Nadim Nabil Nassif, Notre Dame University – Louaize, Zouk Mosbeh, Lebanon
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