The primary data sources for this bibliometric review study were the journals contributing to the focal areas of sports psychology. Due to the large volume of data and reliability of our potential findings, it was necessary to limit ourselves within the list of journals in which the academic society of sports psychology believes those composed of both validity and reliability evidence. The data sources for this analysis were defined and selected from the WoS Master Journal List by Clarivate Analytics (formerly the Institute of Scientific Information by Thomson Reuters since 1956; Clarivate, 2021). WoS is a collection of reputable global citation databases over 250 disciplines and all regions (Clarivate, 2021). The WoS list provides detailed information on scope notes, definitions, and the most important impact factor score of selected journals by index promptly (Clarivate, 2021). To assist us in determining the core journals, we considered the selection criteria followed by previous authors (Lindahl et al., 2015). The criteria included impact factor, relevance to the field of sport psychology, and conformity between the authors conducting the research. This journal selection protocol led to four journals: (1) The Sport Psychologist (SP), (2) Journal of Applied Sport Psychology (JASP), (3) International Journal of Sport Exercise Psychology (IJSEP), and (4) Psychology of Sport Exercise (PSE). In addition to the aforementioned criteria, these journals were chosen because SP is one of the earliest journals dedicated to sport psychology, while JASP, IJSEP, and PSE are the official publications of the Association for Applied Sport Psychology, International Society of Sport Psychology, and European Federation of Sport Psychology, respectively. These organizations are the most widely recognized by researchers and practitioners in sports psychology.

From each journal’s official website, the authors independently visited and searched the document archives using keywords such as “coach,” “coaching,” and “leadership.” Only the leadership behavior of coaches was considered a significant subject matter of this study. Published articles identified by the journal’s electronic search were screened based on the titles with the keywords previously mentioned.

During the selection process, articles were excluded if (1) not relevant to the psychological aspects of coaching and leadership for athletes at different levels of participation, (2) contained only a fractional amount of relevant content to coaching and leadership issues, (3) not published within the specified period between 1990 and 2021, and (4) book review, conference proceedings, and research reports. Next, full-text copies of the articles were retrieved via downloading from the journal’s site, university library, or academic full-text databases. The primary authors meticulously reviewed and categorized the text data into an Excel spreadsheet for details of the selected articles for final data analysis. Any disagreements related to the selection criteria were discussed and resolved with the assistance of an external referee with expertise in similar research field. Three articles were excluded because of duplications. Specific data from the articles that met the review criteria were categorized based on: (1) number of publications, (2) county affiliation of authors, and type of research design. The entire process of the article search until data extraction was conducted in August 2021 (see Figure 1).

Text data from all eligible articles were extracted and then transformed into PDF format to be processed using the Leximancer version 5.0 (Leximancer Pty Ltd.) text mining tool. Leximancer is a kind of bibliometric software that processes textual documents into words, concepts, and themes and presents them as a map of interconnected words together with their level of connections (Crofts and Bisman, 2010).

Inter-coder reliability is often an issue when conducting content analysis. However, because text sources and their segments are automatically and objectively coded and analyzed using this CAQDAS tool, researcher bias coder subjectivity may no longer be considered an issue (Smith and Humphreys, 2006; Sotiriadou et al., 2014).

After processing the extracted data, Leximancer then generate a thesaurus of words and phrases (i.e., themes), which are then transformed into concepts based on contextual similarities based on groups of concepts (Lemon and Hayes, 2020). This text data-mining technique employs semantic and relational extraction on different strata of text datasets (Froggatt, 2001). In other words, the concept and theme-mapping algorithm is based on the hierarchy of appearance and relational extraction derived from Bayesian decision theory (Stemler, 2015). The algorithm automatically identifies words and phrases that co-occur and detects significant networks and semantic patterns among concepts through non-linear dynamics and machine learning methods (McDonald and Kelly, 2020).

Next, a visual display called a “conceptual map” (i.e., colored and grouped bubbles) is automatically generated. This map is a graphic representation depicting the thematic and conceptual relationships of any given text data. The most unique feature of this analytic tool is its ability to generate conceptual maps on the way of developing meaningful outputs. This feature makes this analytic tool superior to traditional qualitative analysis methods in terms of human bias and the ability to process large volumes of data (Sotiriadou et al., 2014). The following are the important features of the conceptual map of Leximancer: (1) colors, denoting the level of importance of each theme (i.e., red indicates the highest level of connectivity while purple is the least connected theme), and (2) size of the theme, denoting the level of clustering appearance of a concept with other concepts within single text mining analysis (Kim, 2021). That is, group clusters of concepts are called “themes” varying from hot colors (red, orange) to cool colors (blue, green).

The Leximancer program generates a dashboard report containing the statistical results of text mining analysis. More specifically, the report is composed of (1) “hit count,” which is a frequency indicator of a word-like concept presented in a dataset; (2) “relevance,” which refers to the co-occurrence of word-like concepts estimated as a percentile rate; and (3) “connectivity,” which is the sum of all the text co-occurrence counts of any given concept with every other concept on the concept map (Leximancer user guide, release 5.0). The report is a quantitative overview of Leximancer’s concept map and presents the thematical and conceptual similarities and differences among the sourced text data. This tool has been adopted by researchers across a variety of disciplines including education (Zawacki-Richter and Naidu, 2016), health (Cretchley et al., 2010a), management/marketing (Anagnostopoulos and Bason, 2015; Kim, 2021), and psychology (Cretchley et al., 2010b; Choi and Kim, 2021).

From the four selected sports psychology journals, 100 articles (IJSEP = 11, JASP = 35, PSE = 43, TSP = 11) have been published in relation to coach leadership in sports over the last 30 years. The number of publications has increased from 2001 onwards in JASP and PSE journals, with more than 10 recorded articles within the 2016–2021 period. On the other hand, the attention of IJSEP and SP in publishing articles about coach leadership was relatively low compared with JASP and PSE despite an increase in publication rate that started from the 2011–2015 period (see Figure 2 Top).

In terms of the research design of published studies from all journals, 76% of all publications were quantitative research, with the majority of articles coming from PSE (35) followed by JASP (26), IJSEP (9) and SP (6). JASP had the highest number of qualitative studies (9), followed by PSE (8), SP (5) while IJSEP had the least number of qualitative studies published (2).

The country affiliations of authors in all published articles were identified and tabulated to determine the countries committed to examining coach leadership in sports. Overall, the United States, followed by Canada, the United Kingdom, and Belgium were the top countries involved in the area of coach leadership. Interestingly, the leading countries that contributed published articles on coach leadership varied depending on each journal. The United Kingdom and Canada were the top contributors to publish articles in IJSEP and PSE journals, respectively. The United States had the most publications in both JASP and SP journals. (See Figure 2 bottom).

Based on the overall text mining analysis from the published articles related to coach leadership in sports, 9 key themes were generated with hit count and connectivity scores ranging from 52 to 540 and 425 to 8,947, respectively. 20 core concepts emerged with textual association relevance ranging from 10 to 100%. See Figure 3.

Across all articles included in this study, the overall results using Leximancer text analysis showed 20 core concepts that were found to be mostly associated with coach leadership and with coaches and athletes to have the highest connectivity with coach leadership. This result is not surprising considering the definition of leadership that consists of a leader and a member/follower (Northouse, 2015), which in this case, the coach and athletes, respectively.

Semantically related concepts were grouped to create key themes (colored circles) and ranked ordered by Leximancer. The most prominent key theme coaches with athletes, relationships, perceptions, leadership, and players as concepts within this key theme pertain to the study topics related to coach leadership. These study topics include coach-athlete relationship as well as perceptions of players about their coaches’ leadership behaviors, since this theme is also linked to theme 3 (behavior). This result support previous findings that published articles focused on coaching research frequently investigated behaviors and perceptions/thoughts of coaches (Sheehy et al., 2018). Moreover, the concept team within the coach key theme seems to indicate its importance in the area of coach leadership in sport, particularly that players or coaches in team sports are the study participants commonly examined in this topic.

The second key theme sport reflects sport-related outcomes that can be affected by the leadership style of coaches, such as motivation, sports climate, performance, and psychological states. Furthermore, sport key theme is closely linked to key theme study with concepts examined and youth, suggesting that published studies are mostly dedicated to examining these sport-related outcomes in youth players.

The third key theme behavior and the related concepts within it suggest the kind of support and interpersonal behaviors related to coaches perceived by players. This notion is corroborated by its link with support key themes with concepts such as autonomy and controlling, indicating types of coach leadership style.

Based on the findings from data analysis, it is important to note that no specific name(s) emerged as a core concept or theme. While Leximancer as a data analysis tool can also identify names of people as concepts, no name-like concepts were generated. This implies that no specific scholar(s) are strongly connected in the area of coach leadership. However, this is open for further investigation since Leximancer’s use is to explore written (word) contents of the publication but does not cover author names as data requirements in order to conduct co-author analysis. Likewise, relationships of journals, citations, and references were not explored due to the analytical tool’s operational constraints. Therefore, the use of other bibliometric technique to examine relationships among relevant publication-related metrics is suggested to complement the limitations of a bibliometric analysis focused only on word contents. Combining different bibliometric techniques in analyzing relevant data of published studies when conducting bibliometric review can provide further insights about the structural relationships among research constituents concerning coach leadership.

The first key theme that emerged from studies in the IJSEP is coaches. In addition, related concepts within this key theme reveal topics about the leadership of coaches, particularly their behaviors in sports settings. The connectedness of this key theme to relationship suggests that studies in this journal focused more on the relationships between coach leadership and athletes’ sport outcomes. This notion is somewhat supported by concept motivation as part of the relevant concepts under coaches’ key theme, indicating how the coach can impact athletes’ motivation.

The key theme relationship linking to the key theme completed implies the methodological approach of data collection via questionnaires. This finding reflects previous results that the majority of published articles used questionnaires when examining coach leadership and its related outcomes (Gilbert and Trudel, 2004).

Relevant concepts such as differences and youth, are also connected with the goal, life, and PYD (positive youth development) concepts, indicating authors who published in IJSEP conducted comparative studies about youth sports players as well as emphasized the role of coaches not only in the improvement of young players’ sports performance but also on the development of their well-being. This notion highlights the importance of coaches in fostering positive values and life skills in athletes via their leadership behaviors. These leadership behaviors would be deliberately teaching positive and non-violent communication skills and respectful behaviors, encouraging active participation and effort during training and competition, providing opportunities to independently work on personal goals and progress, delegating leadership roles among players in the team, and challenging athletes to apply these personal and social life skills to other aspects of their lives aside from sports (Carreres-Ponsoda et al., 2021). In this way, young athletes who learn and apply these values and personal and social skills are not only better equipped to quickly adapt to the demands and stressors of competitive sports in achieving performance excellence but are also well prepared to transfer these positive competencies, attitudes, and behaviors to other parts of their non-sporting lives. This view is also in line with the role of coaches in facilitating positive youth development in sports (Santos et al., 2016).

Interestingly, the distance between the concept/theme punishment is relatively far from the main themes in the concept map despite its link with athletes and behaviors themes. This finding indicates a potential relationship of punishment with athletes and behavior themes but the connection is rather weak. Upon further exploration, punishment was depicted as verbal punishment perceived by players as an acceptable behavior. However, more study is needed to validate this finding in order to further understand how types of punishments can affect players’ sport-related outcomes given that punishment has been reported as an acceptable method to maintain or create order and stability in sports (Seifried, 2008).

The first key theme that emerged from published studies in the JASP related to coach leadership is athletes. Concepts within this theme suggest that articles given attention by this journal are clustered mostly on examining coach behaviors and how they relate to athletes’ motivation, competence, and commitment. Other concepts such as model and female within this key theme reflect how authors exemplify theoretical models in understanding coach-athlete relationships, as well as recognizing women as important sport participants, and how coaches’ behaviors influence their own behaviors and psychological states.

Empowering young girls and women and achieving gender equality is one of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, and sport is recognized as a relevant contributor to realizing this goal (Lemke, 2021). However, despite the substantial growth of women’s participation in sports over the last several decades (International Olympic Committee, 2018a; Nielsen, 2020), there is still a gap in terms of gender equality and participation in sports between men and women (International Olympic Committee, 2018b). Accordingly, researchers interested in understanding this phenomenon have conducted studies focusing on women in sports in general (Senne, 2016; International Olympic Committee, 2018b), while others explored specific topics related to women in sports such as coach leadership and its association with performance and psychological outcomes in female athletes (Vealey et al., 1998; Alexander et al., 2020). Hence, to further place sport as a catalyst for promoting and achieving sustainability goals, particularly gender equality and women empowerment, stated in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Dudfield, 2019), more sport studies related to this topic are warranted.

Key themes revealed and leadership with concepts such as positive, support, perceived, effect, and theory imply that published articles in JASP also analyzed perceived leadership styles and explained the results following a certain theory. This result agrees with the previous report (Sheehy et al., 2018) that one of the intended impacts of leadership studies was to contribute to the development of certain theories.

The key theme study with concepts that include players, soccer, youth, and males is an interesting result suggesting that coach leadership studies published in JASP included study participants composed of mostly male youth players participating in soccer. This finding provides additional information about the characteristics of participants when reviewing coach leadership studies in which previous literature reviews were not able to identify (Sheehy et al., 2018; Gan and Yusof, 2020).

Further, the elite, psychology, and Athletes concepts are relatively distant from the other core themes suggesting these words have weak relationships with coach leadership in this particular journal. This finding underscores how limited elite athletes in this journal are investigated and therefore warrants more studies to further understand the status of elite athletes and their relationships with their coaches.

Results from the text mining analysis of published articles from PSE revealed key themes of coaches, support, sport, and study. The coaches key theme indicates the motivational climate created by a coach and its possible consequences on athletes, such as motivation. The support key theme denotes the interpersonal behaviors of the coach. The sport key theme suggests the perceived behaviors of coaches. Interestingly, the study key theme implies the related theoretical models applied in the studies. Moreover, based on the concept map, the key themes and concepts are closely linked to one another, reflecting that studies published in PSE mostly examined behaviors of coaches, such as controlling and autonomy support, following a theoretical model by probing participants’ perceptions about their coaches.

Furthermore, connections among players, sports, youth, athletes, and team concepts suggest that participants in these studies predominantly comprised young male athletes in team sports. This result is not surprising considering that sports participation rate is often higher in young males and in team sports (Hyde et al., 2020; Eime et al., 2021). It is also important to note that key male and seasonal themes exist in the concept map. However, they are fairly distinct and have low connectivity with other key themes, suggesting the prevalence of coach leadership studies that examined an exclusive set of participants and/or in a particular sporting season but on rare occasions.

Based on the text mining analysis of published articles in SP, the results revealed that the first key theme coaches is about coaches’ characteristics and leadership style. The second key theme, behaviors, pertains to different behaviors that may often be displayed by coaches. The third key theme, leadership, is an outcome variable that may relate to leadership. These prominent key themes, with their relevant concepts linked together, denote studies published in this journal that generally focus on the relationship between leadership style and behaviors of coaches and psychological outcomes such as cohesion.

One interesting finding was the emergence of interviews as a key theme. Although considered a less prominent key theme (away from the main key themes and concepts), its link to the satisfaction key theme implies how data were collected and what topic was examined. This result supports Gilbert and Trudel (2004), who reported interviews as the 2nd prevalent method of data collection in coaching studies and further verified by the lack of disparity between the number of quantitative and qualitative publications found in this journal. However, it is suggested that more coach leadership studies be conducted using qualitative approaches, or better yet, explore this topic using mixed-method approaches so that more complete insights are generated about the topic compared with a single methodological approach (Creswell, 2014).

The present study not only contributes to the body of knowledge in coach leadership as an area of study within the sports psychology domain but also provides a novel approach for extracting and analyzing information from both the entire literature and each journal’s published articles. Using a bibliometric methodology and a more stringent and systematic technique in examining text documents, we were able to identify concepts and themes and their semantic relationships related to coach leadership not previously determined by previous bibliometric reviews. To obtain more valuable insights and further understand coach leadership in sports, we encourage other researchers to continue examining this research topic not only from a general perspective but from a more detailed outlook by utilizing text mining tools to facilitate the systematic quantification of information-rich research articles in a more organized and well-defined concepts and themes that are more logical and comprehensible to decipher. Accordingly, acquiring detailed and comprehensible concepts and ideas about coach leadership and their associated outcomes can lead to better leadership and coaching practices that are sustainable for all sport participants.

This review has also some limitations. Since only articles from the four selected journals were included, data from other sports psychology journals deemed relevant to coach leadership were not assessed. Hence, a more extensive database of journals within the sports psychology domain is recommended for future studies. Identifying potential studies from other databases may help establish a better generalization of the findings. The current study mainly focused on analyzing themes and concepts related to the leadership of (main) coaches. Future researchers may examine the semantic data of other sports leaders, such as assistant coaches or team captains, to offer more and fresher perspectives related to sport leadership.

To conclude, the findings show that coach leadership studies generally focus on behaviors and perceptions related to the coach. Second, it highlights that published studies emphasize uncovering possible relationships between leadership and psychological outcomes. Third, the results underscore that each journal has a similar but distinct rationale when publishing papers about coach leadership. Fourth, the findings identify potential variables for future studies related to coach leadership by distinguishing isolated themes or concepts from the concept map generated by the text analytical tool Leximancer. Finally, the present study showcases the applicability of bibliometric analysis as an alternative methodology to review a research topic with large quantities of written content.