The Evaluation of Sport Management Science-Research Articles in Iran Specialist Journals

The aim of this study was to evaluate sport management science-research articles in Iran specialist journals. The design of the study was qualitative and research method was observation, quantitative content analysis. The population and sample consisted of all sport management articles in Harakat, Research on Sport Sciences, Olympic and Movement Science & Sport journals (N=433) from 1999 to 2010. After the validity of the checklist was confirmed by experts, the reliability among coders was obtained 0.82 using Krippendorff alpha. The results showed that managerial skills in sport (37.18%), education and sport (10.62%) and organizational theories in sport (9.46%) were the most studied areas in Iran specialist journals. Among sport industry segments, the most articles were dedicated to university and school sport (20%), professional sport (14.5%), and education (8%). Regarding the gender in articles, 16.62% focused on men sport, 7.85% on women sport, and 31.17% on both genders. Gender focus of 44.34% of articles was unknown. It can be concluded that these articles did not cover all content areas and sport industry segments, and there is a need to carry out more research on content areas and sport industry segments that had received less attention. Regarding gender, although there was a better balance in comparison with the two previous sections (content areas and sport industry segments), there is a need to conduct more research on women sport because they comprise 50% of society population.