About Journal of Sport and Health Science

Journal of Sport and Health Science

The Journal of Sport and Health Science is a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal launched in 2012 and produced by Elsevier on behalf of Shanghai University of Sport in Shanghai, China. Its editorial office is hosted on the university's campus at 650 Qingyuanhuan Road, Shanghai 200438. Abbreviated JSHS, it publishes research on sport, exercise, physical activity and health, including sports medicine, traditional Chinese exercise and human performance, and it ranks among the world's top sport-science journals. It is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded, PubMed Central and Scopus, appears six times a year, and carries the print ISSN 2095-2546 and the electronic ISSN 2213-2961. Its editor-in-chief is Peijie Chen of Shanghai University of Sport.

Few China-based journals in any field have risen as far or as fast in international rankings as this one. ScienceDirect, its publisher's platform, lists a CiteScore of 21.4 and an Impact Factor of 13.1 for the journal — figures that place it at or near the top of sport science worldwide, ahead of many long-established titles in Europe and North America. Those numbers, which change with each annual release, are best understood as confirmation of the description in its directory record: a Shanghai university journal that has become, by citation measures, one of the leading journals in its discipline globally.

Founding in 2012 and the Shanghai University of Sport base

The journal was launched in 2012, with Scopus coverage running from that year. Its owner is Shanghai University of Sport, a specialist university devoted to sport science, physical education and related health disciplines. Peer review is under the responsibility of Shanghai University of Sport, while production and hosting are by Elsevier, the international scholarly publisher, on the university's behalf — a division of labour stated explicitly on the journal's ScienceDirect pages. Copyright in the journal rests with Shanghai University of Sport.

Basing an international journal at a specialist sport university, rather than at a comprehensive university or a medical school, shapes its character. Sport science is inherently multidisciplinary — it draws on physiology, medicine, psychology, biomechanics, nutrition and public health — and a sport university is one of the few institutions where all of those strands coexist for the same purpose. The journal's breadth, described by Elsevier as international and multidisciplinary, follows naturally from that home, as does its ability to draw editors and reviewers who work on sport and exercise as their primary subject rather than as an occasional interest.

Aims and scope as stated by the publisher

Elsevier describes the Journal of Sport and Health Science as a peer-reviewed, international, multidisciplinary scientific journal dedicated to the advancement of sport, exercise, physical activity and health sciences. It publishes original and impactful research, topical reviews, editorials, opinion and commentary papers relating physical and mental health, injury and disease prevention, traditional Chinese exercise and human performance. Through a distinguished, carefully selected international editorial board, the publisher states, the journal has adopted the highest academic standards, impeccable integrity and an efficient publication platform.

Each element of that scope statement corresponds to a real research community. Physical and mental health covers the evidence that movement affects both body and mind. Injury and disease prevention covers both the athlete who needs to stay uninjured and the general population for whom regular activity reduces the risk of chronic disease. Traditional Chinese exercise — practices such as tai chi and related forms, studied with modern clinical and physiological methods — gives the journal a strand that few Western sport-science titles can match, rooted in its Chinese base. Human performance covers the elite end of the spectrum, where small, measurable gains matter and where methods developed for athletes often later inform rehabilitation and general training.

Sport, exercise and physical activity as public health

A large part of the journal's importance lies in how it treats physical activity as a public-health question, not only as a sporting one. Research on the relationship between physical activity and health outcomes — including cardiovascular health, mental well-being and chronic disease prevention — is central to its pages. Recent thematic directions visible in its contents include the relationship between physical activity and mental health in populations affected by stress, anxiety and depression, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on physical activity levels and health behaviours, especially among vulnerable populations.

Children and young people form another important focus. A prominent recent example in the journal's pages is the Youth Fitness International Test battery project, a modified Delphi consensus involving 169 experts from 50 countries and territories, published in the journal in 2025 to establish a shared battery for monitoring and surveillance of fitness among children and adolescents. A consensus project of that scale, published in a Shanghai journal and authored from institutions on several continents, illustrates concretely how the journal functions: as a convening venue where an international field agrees on shared methods, not merely as a passive recipient of individual studies.

Sports medicine, rehabilitation and performance

In Scopus-based classifications the journal sits at the very top of its medical categories: ranking services report it in the 99th percentile for orthopedics and sports medicine and the 98th percentile for physical therapy and sports therapy, in the top quartile, Q1. Its subject profile in research databases spans physical therapy, physical medicine and rehabilitation, internal medicine and related clinical areas alongside sport science proper. That profile reflects a journal in which a clinician treating sporting injuries, a rehabilitation specialist and an exercise physiologist can all plausibly publish and read.

Human performance research completes the clinical picture. Studies of training, physiology and performance serve coaches, sport scientists and athletes, and they connect the journal to the competitive mission of its host university, whose scholars and students work directly with high-performance sport. The coexistence of performance and health research in one title is a strength rather than a tension: methods, measurements and findings move in both directions between the laboratory, the clinic and the training ground, and a single journal makes that movement visible to all three audiences at once.

Traditional Chinese exercise as a distinctive strand

Traditional Chinese exercise deserves separate attention because it is the element of the scope that most clearly distinguishes this journal from its international competitors. Practices with long histories in China are increasingly prescribed and studied worldwide for balance, mobility, chronic-disease management and mental health, particularly for older adults. Rigorous evaluation of those practices — with controlled designs, objective measures and transparent reporting — requires exactly what this journal offers: editors and reviewers who understand both the practices themselves and modern research methodology.

For international readers, that strand makes the journal a primary source rather than a secondary one. Evidence syntheses and trials of traditional Chinese exercise published elsewhere often depend on primary studies reported from China; a leading English-language journal based in Shanghai, publishing such work under international peer review, shortens that chain and raises the standard of the evidence available to clinicians and guideline writers everywhere.

Publishing model, frequency and editorial leadership

The journal is open access, appears six times a year, and is published on ScienceDirect, where its volumes run continuously from its 2012 launch — volume 15 was in progress for 2026 in the publisher's listing. Its listed editor-in-chief is Peijie Chen of Shanghai University of Sport. Article types include original research, topical reviews, editorials, opinion and commentary, giving the journal both a primary-research function and a forum function in which the field debates priorities and standards.

Open access matters particularly in sport and health science because many of the journal's natural readers are practitioners — clinicians, physiotherapists, coaches, public-health officials and teachers — who may not have university library subscriptions. Free availability through PubMed Central as well as the publisher's platform puts peer-reviewed evidence within reach of the people expected to apply it, which for a health-oriented journal is a substantial part of the point of publishing at all.

Indexing and bibliographic record

The journal is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded, in PubMed Central and in Scopus, and journal directories also list it in the Directory of Open Access Journals, PubMed and Embase. Its bibliographic identifiers are consistent across sources: print ISSN 2095-2546, electronic ISSN 2213-2961, standard abbreviation J. Sport Health Sci. The editorial address given in indexing records is the same address the publisher gives — Editorial Board, 650 Qingyuanhuan Road, Shanghai 200438, China — tying the bibliographic record directly to the campus that hosts it.

Indexing in PubMed Central is especially significant for a sport-science title. It places the journal's contents inside the principal biomedical literature system used by clinicians and health researchers worldwide, alongside its presence in the sport-science literature through Scopus and Web of Science. That dual presence mirrors the journal's dual identity — a sport journal that is also a health journal — and helps explain the breadth of its citation base and the height of its citation metrics.

Metrics and international standing

The publisher's platform lists a CiteScore of 21.4 and an Impact Factor of 13.1 for the journal. Independent ranking services, using Scopus and Journal Citation Reports data for particular years, have reported similarly exceptional figures — an SJR in the region of three or above and top-quartile placement in every category in which the journal is classified. Its h-index in Scopus-based listings is in the sixties to seventies depending on the year and source consulted. Directory summaries should treat any single year's figure cautiously, since all such metrics are revised annually, but the direction is unambiguous and consistent across sources: this is one of the most highly cited journals in sport and health science in the world.

Standing of that kind changes a journal's function. Highly ranked journals attract submissions from leading groups worldwide, which raises selectivity, which in turn sustains the ranking. International authorship visible in the journal's contents — multi-country consensus projects, collaborations across continents, and a top-publishing-affiliations list led by, but not limited to, its host university — shows that cycle operating. Shanghai University of Sport is itself the largest single affiliated source of papers, as would be expected, but the journal's authorship and editorial board are described by its publisher as international, and its contents bear that out.

Place in Chinese scholarly publishing

Within China, the Journal of Sport and Health Science is a frequently cited example of what a focused, English-language, internationally partnered university journal can achieve. It did not attempt to cover all of medicine or all of science; it took a field in which its host institution is genuinely specialised, partnered with a major international publisher for production and hosting, kept peer review under the university's own responsibility, adopted open access, and pursued the indexing — SCIE, Scopus and PubMed Central — that its readers actually use. Its trajectory since 2012 is therefore instructive well beyond sport science.

For a media directory, its profile can be summarised precisely: Journal of Sport and Health Science; Shanghai; owned by Shanghai University of Sport, with its editorial office at 650 Qingyuanhuan Road, Shanghai 200438; produced and hosted by Elsevier on the university's behalf; launched 2012; open access, six issues a year; editor-in-chief Peijie Chen; print ISSN 2095-2546, electronic ISSN 2213-2961; indexed in SCI-Expanded, PubMed Central and Scopus; publishing original research, reviews, editorials and commentary on sport, exercise, physical activity and health, including sports medicine, traditional Chinese exercise and human performance. On the evidence of its own publisher's metrics, it is not only China's leading journal in its field but one of the leading sport-science journals anywhere.