The Evolutionary Trajectory and Frontier Hotspots of Interdisciplinary Research in Sports: a Visual Analysis Based on Citespace Bibliometrics

Taking 373 journal articles on interdisciplinary sports research included in the CNKI database from 1994 to 2025 as the research object. This study employed the Cite Space V scientific literature metrology knowledge mapping method to conduct a visual analysis of the publication time, research hotspots, evolution trajectory, and core teams of interdisciplinary sports research. The research findings indicate that interdisciplinary sports research in China can be roughly divided into two stages: the stable period and the mutation period. The research mainly focuses on core literacy, new curriculum standards, primary education, and physical education teachers, thereby promoting the design of interdisciplinary sports courses and teachers’ understanding of interdisciplinary studies. The mutation interval is concentrated from 2019 to 2025, with core literacy, new curriculum standards, primary school physical education, and physical education teaching becoming mutation hot keywords, and new topics such as collaborative teaching, the integration of five educations, unit design, and teaching strategies emerging. Core research teams include the School of Physical Education and Health at East China Normal University, the School of Physical Education at Yunnan Normal University, and the School of Physical Education and Health at East China Jiaotong University. The initial form of a key institution cooperation chain has taken shape, but the cooperation density among authors and research institutions is relatively low, and a research community with cross-regional, cross-disciplinary, and multi-stage characteristics has not yet been formed. Future research should focus on breaking through the transformation of sports cognition from simple science to complex science, promoting the balanced development of interdisciplinary sports research, strengthening micro-research on interdisciplinary sports theme learning and building a teaching research community for interdisciplinary sports theme learning.