Injury risk and prevention research in sports: Are the titles delivering on their promises or just a sales pitch to capitalize on a hot topic?
A systematic scoping review including 1,390 studies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51224/SRXIV.429Keywords:
injury risk, injury prevention, science communication, metascience, data reportingAbstract
Background: Injury risk and prevention are hot topics, leading to authors using “catchy” titles to grab the readers’ attention.
Objectives: To assess if empirical studies with titles containing “injury risk” or “injury prevention” deliver injury data.
Methods: Scoping review of injury risk or prevention studies with athletes and para-athletes. Databases included CINAHL, EMBASE, PubMed, Scopus, SPORTDiscus, Web of Science (no date or language limits). Matching of titles to injury data used a two-layer system.
Results: Of 147,125 records screened, 1,390 studies were included. Nearly one-third of empirical studies with “injury prevention” or “injury risk” in their title failed to provide injury data. Almost 40% of titles using “injury prevention” provided no injury data, and ~25% had injury data that were unrelated to any prevention measure. Titles could include qualifiers to denote that their goal was not to assess injuries, but related topics (e.g., adherence to an injury prevention program). Considering only titles with no such qualifiers, injury data were still absent in ~20% of the studies and this omission has been increasing consistently over time (e.g., 10% from 1984-2000, 22% from 2016-onwards).
Conclusions: A growing percentage of empirical studies with titles about “injury risk” and “injury prevention” do not report injury data, potentially leading to wasted research effort and misguided practical applications. Authors, reviewers, and editors share responsibility for accurate portrayal of injury studies. We propose a ruleset for more transparent reporting in future studies.
Registration: Open Science Framework public project (https://osf.io/5ybvc/) and registration (https://osf.io/atx5j).
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Copyright (c) 2024 José Afonso, Andreia Pizarro, Tania Pizzari, Guus Reurink, Filipe Manuel Clemente, Ana Filipa Silva, Zeki Akyildiz, Rongzhi Chen, Rohit Kumar Thapa, João Renato Silva, Hugo Sarmento, Rodrigo Ramirez-Campillo, Renato Andrade, Sílvia Rocha-Rodrigues (Author)
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