Research Productivity in the Human Movement Sciences in the Philippines: A Descriptive Bibliometric and Social Network Analysis

The interdisciplinary field of human movement sciences (HMS) has gained massive interest among educational institutions around the world, not only in terms of academic programs but also in research. With this emergence, the researchers aimed to describe the productivity of HMS research in the Philippines. The descriptive bibliometric analysis phase of this paper considered papers published and indexed in Google Scholar from January 2010 to June 2021 and was analyzed after data cleaning and preprocessing. Results revealed that a total of 274 research publications were recorded between the years 2010 and 2021 with an average annual publication rate of 28.6% as far as the dataset was concerned. Also, public higher education institutions (HEIs) emerged to be the most productive generators of research outputs, specifically topped by the University of the Philippines (UP). Moreover, UP-based authors dominated the rankings of the most productive HMS researchers, with "Jeffrey Pagaduan" in the top rank. Results further indicated that 75% of the authors collaborated with fellow researchers within or outside their institution. Meanwhile, the term "physical education" was recorded to be the most frequently appearing word in most of the publications. Through the aid of the data mining approach social network analysis (SNA), five (5) researchers from public HEIs and two from private HEIs were identified to have the largest networks as discussed in the paper. The exploration of research in terms of productivity and the embedded social network of researchers may serve as a springboard in defining the future development of the field in the Philippines.