Kickboxing scientific production indexed on PubMed: productivity, topics and citations

Background. Kickboxing is a combat sport created in the 70s and is nowadays on the rise, being one of the best-known and practiced in the world. Problem and aim. Our objective is to carry out a bibliometric analysis of the most published topics, most cited articles, most productive journals, and authors within kickboxing scientific production indexed on PubMed database. Material and methods. We searched PubMed for the keyword "kickboxing" on 01/26/2022 and found 107 studies and after applying the exclusion criteria, 103 remained. To collect the citations for each article, they were consulted on Google Scholar. Results. The most published and cited studies are related to injuries, followed by studies with physiological analyses. The most productive newspapers with the modality were "The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research" (n = 7), followed by the "International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health" (n = 4). Among the most productive authors in thefirst place was the Brazilian researcher Emerson Franchini (n = 11), followed by the Tunisian Ibrahim Ouergui (n = 9). In this ranking, a tie the frequency of appearance was observed between Polish and other Tunisian researchers (both with 4 researchers). Conclusions. Many studies need to be undertaken to advance the science of kickboxing. We speculate that with recognition by the International Olympic Committee, studies into kickboxing will consequently increase.