About Journal of Sport and Health Research

Journal of Sport and Health Research — A Complete Profile

At a Glance

What This Journal Is

The Journal of Sport and Health Research (JSHR) is a Spanish, multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal for research at the meeting point of sport, physical activity, health and education. It is the journal associated with D.A.A., the Asociación Didáctica Andalucía — described on the journal's own home page as a professional association of health, sport and education — and it is published from Jaén in Andalusia. Its stated aim, in the journal's own words on its current platform, is to serve as a tool for scientific dissemination and research in the field of physical activity and health sciences, covering every topic related to sport, physical activity, education and health.

JSHR is a broad church by design. A single recent volume can carry exercise physiology, studies of physical education pedagogy, sport psychology, work on sedentary behaviour and metabolic risk in university students, wheelchair sport performance analysis, and research on gender stereotypes among physical education teachers. That breadth reflects its institutional base: an association of practitioners and researchers across health, sport and education, rather than a single university department or a commercial publisher's subject silo. Authors should nonetheless read the breadth correctly — the journal's centre of gravity is applied research on physical activity and health, and manuscripts are expected to speak to that community.

Identity, History and Platform

The journal's identity is fixed by one ISSN, 1989-6239, which appears on its article mastheads (a 2025 article is headed "J Sport Health Res ISSN: 1989-6239") and in every catalogue record consulted for this profile; bibliographic services that distinguish print and electronic ISSNs give the same number for both, the mark of a title registered once for its digital life. The journal has been publishing since 2009: its volumes run annually, so that volume 17 corresponds to 2025 and volume 18 to 2026, and its current issue at the time this profile was prepared was volume 18, supplement 1 (2026) on the RECYT platform.

The platform history matters to anyone trying to find or cite the journal. For much of its life JSHR was reached through a site at ms-pes.com, the address still given as the journal's homepage in the OpenAlex source record. That domain no longer serves the journal — at the time of checking it returned an unrelated site — and readers or authors who follow old links will be misled. The journal's living home is RECYT, the open journal platform operated for Spanish scientific journals under FECYT, where the full archive, current issue and submission route are maintained under the journal code JSHR. This profile therefore treats RECYT as the journal's official address and the old domain as a historical artefact; librarians holding the old URL in their catalogues should update it.

On RECYT the journal presents itself bilingually. Spanish and English are its languages of publication, and its article stock is correspondingly mixed: Spanish-language work from Spain and Latin America sits alongside English-language submissions from Europe, Turkey and beyond, a pattern visible in the 2025 supplements, which carried studies from Turkish and Spanish research groups side by side.

Scope and Article Types

The journal's own statement of scope covers all topics related to physical activity, sports, health and education, and the journal describes itself as multidisciplinary, featuring investigations, studies and reviews whose common thread is the science of physical activity and health. In practice its subject profile — as summarised in the OpenAlex topic record for the title — is headed by physical activity and health, sports performance and training, sports and physical education studies, physical education and pedagogy, and sport psychology and performance. SCImago-derived category listings add the health-professions flank: orthopaedics and sports medicine, physical therapy and rehabilitation, public, environmental and occupational health, complementary and manual therapy, cultural studies, education, and developmental and educational psychology.

The journal accepts the following genres, as stated on its home page:

• Original articles — research across the fields within its scope.
• Review articles — syntheses of a research area.
• Clinical cases — case-based contributions from health and sport practice.
• Letters to the editor — short communications and commentary.
• Invited papers — articles commissioned by the editors from researchers of recognised prestige in the journal's fields; these are always commissioned, never submitted speculatively.

The journal appears three times a year, with supplementary issues in some years — 2025, for instance, ran to at least two supplements in addition to the regular issues, carrying themed and conference-linked collections. Its declaration of immediate open access is made in the standard open journal platform wording: the journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely reachable to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Editorial and Publishing Arrangements

JSHR is an association journal. The publisher of record in international listings is the Asociación Didáctica Andalucía (also rendered Asoc. Didáctica Andalucía and abbreviated D.A.A.), based in Jaén, Spain, and the journal is described on its own pages as the scientific journal associated with that institution. The association's professional character — it presents itself as a body of health, sport and education professionals — shapes the journal's applied, practitioner-aware tone. Editorial work is conducted through the RECYT platform, which handles submission, review workflow and publication for the journal as it does for many Spanish society titles.

One caution belongs in any honest profile. The journal's author-facing commercial terms — whether any fee applies at submission or acceptance, and under what licence articles are released — could not be verified from the journal's current public pages consulted for this profile, so they are recorded here as could not be verified rather than guessed. Authors should read the journal's current author instructions on RECYT before submitting and confirm any charge and licence there. A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals by this journal's ISSN returned no listing at the time of checking, so no DOAJ listing is claimed for the title in this profile; that is a statement about the directory, not about the journal's open access practice, which the journal itself declares.

Indexing and Metrics — Read Them by Source

The journal's citation record is real but modest, and the figures differ by database in instructive ways. OpenAlex resolves the title at source S2738320308 and records 608 works with 1,142 citations, summary statistics of an h-index of 12 and an i10-index of 16, and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.42. SCImago-derived listings, built on Scopus data, report an SJR of 0.272 and an h-index of 13, with Scopus coverage of the title running from 2018; this site's own earlier thin record carried an h-index of 15. These are not contradictions so much as different counting windows and corpora — OpenAlex reaches further back and wider, Scopus counts a curated subset — and the profile states them with their sources so that readers can reproduce each number rather than treating any one as official. SCImago-derived category quartiles for the journal vary by subject: listings consulted showed its strongest placement in Cultural Studies and mid-to-lower quartiles across its health and education categories, which is the normal pattern for a multidisciplinary journal whose papers are scattered across many category schemes. The journal has no Clarivate Journal Impact Factor that could be verified from the sources consulted, and none is claimed.

For evaluation purposes the practical reading is this: JSHR is a Scopus-covered, Spanish association journal with a genuine international authorship, an eighteen-volume archive and citation indicators typical of a specialist applied field. A 2025 snapshot in one bibliographic service counted 38 articles published in that year across its regular and supplementary issues, which gives a fair sense of its annual volume — large enough to sustain a community, small enough that each article is a visible part of the record.

How to Submit

Submission is through the journal's RECYT site, where the current issue, the archive and the author instructions are maintained. Before submitting, authors should: confirm the manuscript sits inside the physical activity, sport, health and education scope; prepare the text in Spanish or English; choose the correct genre (original article, review, clinical case or letter), remembering that invited papers are commissioned only; and follow the formatting and ethical declarations in the current instructions on the platform. Because the journal's older web address no longer serves it, authors should begin from the RECYT journal page and not from links in older papers, old bookmarks or third-party listings that still show the former domain. Any question about fees or licensing should be settled from the current instructions or by writing to the editorial office through the platform before submission, since those terms could not be verified for this profile.

Reading the Archive: What the Journal Actually Publishes

The journal's recent contents show the scope statement in action. In volume 17 (2025), issue 1 carried a study of the correlation between use of the Sport Education model and gender stereotypes among physical education teachers, comparing teachers who used the model with those who did not across five dimensions of stereotype belief. The 2025 supplements ranged wider still: a review of psychological interventions in alternative sports, centred on the psychological preparation of Quadball (Quidditch) players; a laboratory study of wheelchair racing that tracked blood lactate, triceps brachii muscle activity and handrim power output through an incremental roller test, identifying an anaerobic threshold at higher racing speeds; and a large survey study of sedentary time and type-2 diabetes risk among Turkish university students, assessed with the FINDRISC score, which found weak but consistent associations between sitting time and diabetes risk, with longer sedentary periods among students with chronic disease, regular medication users and smokers. Exercise physiology, pedagogy, adapted sport and student public health in one volume year is a faithful picture of this journal: the connective tissue is physical activity and health, not a single method or population.

Two practical conclusions follow for prospective authors. First, the supplements are a real part of the journal's output, not an afterthought: themed and collective issues appear under the same ISSN and masthead as the regular numbers, and authors of conference-linked or group projects may find a supplement the natural home for a coherent set of papers. Second, the journal's bilingual promise is practised, not just stated — the 2025 articles above appeared in English from Spanish and Turkish groups alike, while the journal continues to publish Spanish-language research for its home community in Andalusia and across the Spanish-speaking world.

The Journal in the Spanish Research Ecosystem

JSHR's presence on RECYT places it inside Spain's publicly supported journal infrastructure. RECYT, run under the Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología (FECYT), is the platform through which a large share of Spain's society and university journals manage submission and publication, and its masthead on a journal is a signal that the title works to the platform's editorial quality expectations for Spanish scientific journals. For the journal's core authors — researchers in Spanish faculties of sport sciences and physical activity, education and health — publication in a RECYT-hosted, Scopus-covered title counts inside the merit frameworks that govern Spanish academic careers, which is one reason an association journal of this size sustains a steady flow of domestic submissions alongside its international ones.

The journal's history also illustrates a pattern common to Spanish society publishing: a professional association founds a journal to serve its field, the title grows an international authorship faster than its first web arrangements can comfortably support, and the journal eventually consolidates on the national platform. The move from a stand-alone site to RECYT is the visible end of that process for JSHR, and it is why this profile insists on the platform address as the journal's home: citations, syllabi and library records that still point to the retired domain send readers to a page that has nothing to do with the journal, and authors invited to submit through look-alike or stale links should check that they are on the RECYT journal page before sending any manuscript or payment.

Disambiguation: Three Titles That Are Not This Journal

The journal's name sits in a crowded neighbourhood, and confusion is a genuine risk for authors and librarians. The Journal of Sport and Health Science is a different, Elsevier-published title with different ISSNs, edited from China, and a much larger citation footprint. Sport Sciences and Health Research, published by the University of Tehran under its own online ISSN 2981-0205, is another distinct journal — its Journals World profile discusses this very confusion — and Sport Sciences for Health is a Springer journal from Italy. None of those titles is the Journal of Sport and Health Research. The safe test is the identifier: if the record does not show ISSN 1989-6239 and the Asociación Didáctica Andalucía in Jaén, it is not this journal.

Who Should Publish Here

JSHR suits researchers with applied work on physical activity and health who want a Spanish-and-English venue with Scopus coverage and immediate open access: physical education researchers, sport and exercise scientists, health-promotion and public-health groups, sports medicine and rehabilitation practitioners with case material, and sport psychologists. Its bilingual character is a particular asset for Spanish-speaking scholars seeking international readers without abandoning their language, and for international teams working with Spanish or Latin American populations. It is a weaker fit for work whose natural home is a highly competitive medical or physiology title, for manuscripts outside the activity-and-health remit, and for authors whose evaluation systems credit only journals holding a Clarivate impact factor, since none could be verified here.

A Note on Evaluating This Journal

Authors sometimes ask whether a journal of this profile is "worth" publishing in, and the honest answer is conditional. If your institution rewards Scopus coverage, open access reach and a readership of practitioners as well as researchers, JSHR delivers all three, in two languages, from a stable national platform with an unbroken run since 2009. If your evaluation system counts only first-quartile titles or journals holding a Clarivate impact factor, this journal will not satisfy it, and no profile should pretend otherwise. What the record does support is a working, peer-reviewed, association-run journal with a defined community and a long archive — and for applied physical-activity and health research aimed at the Spanish-speaking world and its international collaborators, that is a legitimate and often well-judged destination.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the journal's ISSN? 1989-6239.

Who publishes it? The Asociación Didáctica Andalucía (D.A.A.), a professional association of health, sport and education based in Jaén, Spain.

Since when has it published? Since 2009; volume 18 appeared in 2026.

How often does it appear? Three issues a year, with supplements in some years.

Is it open access? The journal declares immediate open access on its RECYT home page. Its precise licence terms could not be verified from the pages consulted.

Where is its website? On the RECYT platform at recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/JSHR. Its former domain no longer serves the journal.

Is it in DOAJ? A DOAJ search by ISSN returned no listing at the time of checking, so no listing is claimed.

Does it have an impact factor? No Clarivate Journal Impact Factor could be verified. Attributed alternatives: OpenAlex h-index 12 (608 works, 1,142 citations); SCImago SJR 0.272 on Scopus data.

Profile prepared from the journal's own pages on the RECYT (FECYT) platform, the OpenAlex source record S2738320308 and SCImago-derived listings, all consulted directly for this profile. Figures are stated as at the time of checking and attributed to their sources in the text.