Digitalization in sport psychology: A bibliometric analysis of emerging research trends

This study examines the conceptual structure, dominant research themes, and intellectual foundations of research on digitalization in sport psychology through a bibliometric analysis, aiming to map how the fragmented literature on digital service delivery, social media, virtual reality, wearable technologies, and athlete mental health is organized. Bibliographic records were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection using a Topic-field search that combined sport psychology, digitalization, and psychological outcome terms and was limited to English-language articles and reviews. The final dataset comprised 325 publications. Data were analyzed using the Bibliometric package in R through keyword frequency analysis, keyword co-occurrence network analysis, thematic mapping, and reference co-citation analysis. The keyword co-occurrence network separated into two main clusters: one organized around sport, performance, exercise, motivation, and social media, and the other around physical activity, mental health, children, anxiety, and depression. The thematic map located the physical activity/mental health and anxiety/depression clusters among the basic themes, while the sport/social media/gender cluster was positioned at the boundary between niche and motor themes. The reference co-citation network revealed four clusters anchored, respectively, by self-determination theory and sport-participation research, athlete social-media and measurement-model studies, elite-athlete mental health consensus and review literature, and mental-health stigma and help-seeking research. Because the analysis is cross-sectional, these results indicate conceptual proximity within the analyzed dataset rather than a demonstrated temporal shift toward integration. The study contributes a conceptual and intellectual map of this literature and identifies research priorities for sport psychologists, practitioners, and researchers, while its findings are limited by reliance on a single database and English-language publications.