Summary: | Since the inception of the Every Student Succeeds Act [ESSA] of 2016, the US has brought focus to the role that research and evidence should play into the decision-making process of stakeholders [ESSA, 2015]. As members of the field turn to research and the knowledge base at large to shape practice, there is incentive to explore the knowledge base to pinpoint influential publications retrospectively. To that end, the focus of this study was to generate a summary of the key characteristics of the top-cited publications that pertain to different categories (e.g., cross-disciplinary, learners and learning, diversity and differences, teachers, teaching and teacher education, and physical education curriculum) relating to physical education (PE). Specifically, the focus was to create lists of the top 20 cited publications on different PE research categories. A systematic search on the Web of Science [WoS] was enacted using keywords related to PE. The research team independently reviewed the results and screened the top 20 lists. Extracted data provided points for further examination of the sum of citations, type of study, journal, authorship, and country of publication. As of September 15th, 2021, the top 20 lists have been cited 25,617 times. These publications have been disseminated across 48 different journals. On average, each publication had 3.6 authors, the USA and England as the leaders in terms of country of publication. In creating these top 20 lists of the top-cited publications involving PE, the research team hopes to provide members of the PE field with an easy to consume reading list of top-cited research and a concise summary of the publication characteristics.
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