Identifying the “Players” in Sports Analytics Research

Despite a sports analytics research history that goes back more than 50 years and a recent dramatic rise in the level of scholarly interest in sports analytics, no prior research has attempted to identify its scope, scale, and growth in terms of the body of published refereed articles in the literature. Prior research has also not identified the “players” in the field: the journals and institutions that most commonly publish sports analytics research and are most commonly cited. To answer these questions, I examined 140 journals in operations research, statistics, applied mathematics, and applied economics, and identified 1,146 articles that address the application of analytics in sports. The results provide a picture of the size and nature of sports analytics research and its purveyors, and offer some perspective on the parameters of the field.