Sport specialization or diversification? Proposals to move beyond a polarized debate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the field of sport, the persistent polarization between specialization and diversification hinders both the understanding of on-the-ground realities and the implementation of appropriate interventions. Public and institutional discourses, rooted in rigid oppositions, limit the implementation of sports development strategies that respond to the diverse needs of children and adolescents. This narrative review offers a critical interpretation of the scientific literature on this debate, highlighting ongoing conceptual tensions and areas of ambiguity. The analysis reveals a significant call for nuance, both in understanding sports trajectories and in analyzing modes of supervision. On this basis, an operationally oriented conceptual model is proposed: the Sandbox of Appropriate Sports Practice. By intersecting the single-sport/multisport continuum with levels of engagement, this model aims to bridge research findings and suitable intervention frameworks.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.095 | 0.070 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.086 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.047 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.023 | 0.026 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".