Vital signs or flatline? Canadian physical and health education research publication activity

ABSTRACT

To inform a response to recent critiques of physical and health education (PHE) research activity within Canadian universities, this research inquired into peer-reviewed PHE publications by Canadian-based authors between 2010 and 2015 via an analysis of published research method framed within a ‘health’ metaphor. The three-phase method involved: (a) identifying Canadian-authored English-language PHE journal articles via targeted database keyword searches designed in consultation with an academic librarian and the Physical and Health Education Canada Research Council executive; (b) categorizing the publications by extracting data related to author affiliation, journal name, research question, and funding acknowledgement; and (c) conducting basic descriptive statistics to report findings on publication topics, authorship characteristics, journal outlets, and funding rates and sources. Results were interpreted through the lens of common criteria within Canadian tenure, promotion, and performance reviews for ‘healthy’ research publication activity: quantity of publications, prestige of publication outlets, knowledge mobilization to national and international practitioners and academics, and (external) funding. Findings revealed relatively ‘healthy’ measures of publication quantity, prestigious external funding, and nationally-focused knowledge mobilization to stakeholders inside and outside of academia. However, findings also revealed limits in the proportion of research published in prestigious journals and journals easily accessible to international audiences, both of which could be interpreted or represented (and subsequently weaponized) by others as ‘illness’. While it is neither our aim, nor place, to prescribe a way forward – as that is for the larger community of Canadian-based PHE scholars to consider together – it is our hope that this research provides the descriptive data and reflection needed to inform the beginnings of evidence-based discussion, action, and advocacy regarding PHE research publication activity in Canada.

KEYWORDS:

• Physical and health education
• Canada
• publication activity
• analysis of published research
• metaphor
• advocacy
• audit culture

Acknowledgements

This manuscript stems from research that was supported by the Physical and Health Education Canada Research Council. The authors also gratefully acknowledge Dr. Hal Lawson who offered helpful feedback at an early stage of the project. The views and conclusions outlined in this manuscript remain, of course, the sole responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Italics are used when introducing and emphasizing metaphorical components.

2 There are arguments, and some initial evidence, that COVID-19 will result in the expansion of free market rationalities in universities (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2020). That is, as public funds are diverted from universities and repurposed to respond to the pandemic, academic labour conditions will be reconfigured (e.g., teaching loads increased, adjuntification expanded, etc.) to account for the economic shortfall (all while students, staff, and faculty are too emotionally and physically distracted to mount an effective response of resistance). Some are calling this phenomenon ‘Coronavrius Capitalism’ (Klein, 2020).

3 Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy is a common name used in English-speaking parts of Europe and Australia/Oceania to describe the field of study we refer to in Canada more commonly as PHE.

4 A period of time that could be considered substantive enough for investigation (e.g. parallels the length of time in which a tenure-track Canadian scholar has available to apply for tenure) and which immediately preceded the Queen’s University statement.

5 Although Canada is an officially bi-lingual (i.e. English and French) country, this research was limited to English-language literature given the limits in our linguistic capacities.

6 It is important to note some challenges associated with this design, specifically that these database searches returned very large numbers of results: 80,000 in the Academic Search Complete database and 12,000 in the Proquest Education Journals database. Upon review of these results, we noticed that despite the filter for ‘no duplicates’ being selected, duplicates still appeared, and also that many irrelevant results were returned. Further consultations with an academic librarian revealed that the breadth of the search returned so many results that it caused the database algorithms to fail at a certain point. The librarian recommended developing a threshold point at which we could determine the algorithm had failed and to stop there. With the librarian’s guidance, we decided that once we were through 50% of the total number of results, and were seeing one or fewer relevant results per page (with 50 results displayed per page) for five consecutive pages, we could assume we had reached the algorithm’s limit and stop searching.

7 Note that we also included those articles that had variations of the search terms, e.g., ‘physical educators’ rather than ‘physical education’.

8 To inform the researchers’ development of these codes, a variety of physical education texts were reviewed so as to understand the way in which these texts had categorized physical education topics (e.g., Ennis [2016]; Kirk et al. [2006]; and Robinson and Randall [2014]).

9 The impact factor of a journal refers to ‘a value calculated annually based on the number of times articles published in a journal are cited in two, or more, of the preceding years’ (Moustafa, 2015, p. 139). Although originally invented as a tool to guide librarians’ decision-making regarding journal subscriptions, it has inappropriately come to represent journal quality and, subsequently, prestige in academia (Moustafa, 2015). Controversy regarding the metric stems from limitations in the metric, for example, the fact that ‘in most cases only a few articles contribute to the acquisition of the journal impact factor, excluding any correlation between an article and the journal in which the article was published’ (Moustafa, 2015, p. 140), as well as the effect or consequences of the metric’s misuse, for example ‘huge pressures on authors, editors, stakeholders and funders’ (Moustafa, 2015, p. 139).