Abstract
One goal of publishing research is to share knowledge with a wide audience of interested stakeholders. For example, studies on relative age effects (RAEs) in sport can potentially have influential consequences on research and policies in sport, and also in other domains such as education, psychology, and sociology. The purpose of this study was to implement a two-phase design to understand how studies conducted on RAEs in sport are shared in sport science and across other domains. For Phase 1, we performed a citation analysis on all peer-reviewed, published articles that examined RAEs in sport (N = 86), revealing that the articles which were most cited by sport RAE researchers tended to focus on male, team sports that had significant results, while generally overlooking female, individual sports and those with non-significant results. For Phase 2, we then examined how these 86 sport articles were cited across research domains outside of sport science. Again, the articles that were cited most frequently tended to focus on male, team sports and reported the presence of a RAE. Additionally, many of the top-cited sport articles did not focus solely on RAEs; rather, they also included research topics such as birthplace, talent development, and motivation. In this paper we discuss the implications of homogeneous citation practices as well as the characteristics of research most conducive to being shared both within and between domains.Acknowledgments: This research was supported in part by a standard research grant (grant # 410-2011-0472) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.