Performance‐enhancing substances in sport: A scientometric review of 75 years of research
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The use of performance-enhancing substances not only undermines the core values of sports but also poses significant health risks to athletes. In a fast-evolving doping environment, where sport professionals are constantly seeking novel and illegal means to bypass doping tests, and new substances are regularly detected on the drug market, it is crucial to inform authorities with updated evidence emerging from scientific research. The current study aims to (i) outline the structure of knowledge in the literature on performance enhancers in sports (i.e., most active countries, main sources, most productive authors, and most frequently used keywords); (ii) identify the most impactful documents in the field; and (iii) uncover the main domains of research in the literature. To do so, we conducted a comprehensive scientometric analysis of the literature on doping, sourcing our data from Scopus. Our research involved a document co-citation analysis of 193,076 references, leading to the identification of the 51 most influential documents and seven key thematic areas within the doping literature. Our results indicate that the scientific community has extensively studied the most prevalent doping classes, such as anabolic agents and peptide hormones, and little is still known about the use of contaminated supplements or other types of enhancers identified as emergent trends. Concurrently, technological advancements contributed to the development of more sophisticated doping detection techniques, using blood or urine samples. More recently, the focus has shifted towards the athlete biological passport, with research efforts aimed at identifying biomarkers indicative of doping. The dynamic nature of doping methods underlines the necessity for more robust educational campaigns, aiming at raising awareness among sports professionals and their entourage about the dangers of doping and the intricacies of its control mechanisms.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.055 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it