Science and medicine in football: progress & evolution

Science and Medicine in Football has been a regular supplement of the Journal of Sports Sciences over the past three years. Due to the increasing contributions from the football community, as well as the supplement´s overall success, reflected in factors such as the breadth and number of submissions, readership, citations and social media reach, we will launch as a stand-alone journal in 2017. Details of this process will be available on the journal’s new website www.tandfonline.com/rsmf as well as the journal’s Twitter account (#SciMedFootball). The mission of the journal will remain to provide scientific evidence for football-related activities. Evidence-based decision-making processes in the field have to integrate the best available research with practitioner expertise and values of the target population (Sackett, Rosenberg, Gray, Haynes, & Richardson, 1996). The aim of Science and Medicine in Football is therefore to advance the theoretical knowledge, methodological approaches and the professional practice associated with the sport of football. To improve and ensure a high methodological quality of the published papers, besides other established scientific criteria, special attention will be devoted to the following aspects:

• Quality of reporting: Accurate and complete reporting of methods and results is crucial to ascertain the methodological quality of any publication. Authors will be referred to international statements and standards.

• Research designs and limitations: The research designs should be clearly specified and their limitations highlighted in the discussion. This will allow the reader to better interpret the results based on the potential limitations of the study (risk of bias). Such a critical approach is particularly important for studies in elite football, which sometimes face constraints of low sample size and lacking opportunities to change traditional habits of training and team conduct.

• Replication studies: A single randomised controlled trial is not enough – even when it is carried out well. Results from different research groups are necessary to strengthen the evidence. Therefore, the availability of few previous studies on a specific topic will not be considered to represent a “lack of novelty”.

• Negative studies: The publication bias is a well-known problem in research. Science and Medicine in Football will address this problem before submission (with calls for negative studies), and by controlling the review process (lacking effects must not be considered a sufficient reason for rejection by the reviewers). By this procedure, we hope to bring to light interesting results from studies that are frequently held back from publication. Studies showing no effects are as useful for practitioners as those ones indicating efficacy of given interventions (e.g., by showing what might not work or of which the efficacy has to be considered questionable).

• Reviews: Reviews which are not systematic and accurately presented (e.g., with meta-analysis) will be considered opinion pieces. The authors will be referred to international statements and standards of literature search and reporting.

• Practical applications: Although quite common in several journals, this section is often very generic and unspecific. Authors of papers accepted for Science and Medicine in Football will be strongly encouraged to provide more specific and real-world examples on how to use the study results in practice. In case the authors have no idea, we will dare to make suggestions.

We hope to fulfil all expectations of the scientific football community by following these standards, and otherwise maintaining our established peer-review procedures. In this sense, you – the reviewers – are our most important tool to guarantee high quality of papers published in Science and Medicine in Football. In addition, we promise that our editorial mission will remain “transparency”, which we consider the key attribute to ensure quality. Of course, we will remain open for suggestions and criticism from our readers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.