Sports Health A Multidisciplinary Approach

About Sports Health A Multidisciplinary Approach

About Sports Health: A Multidisciplinary Approach

Sports Health: A Multidisciplinary Approach, usually shortened to Sports Health, is a bimonthly peer-reviewed medical journal in sports medicine, published by SAGE Publications since 2009. Its ISSNs are 1941-7381 for print and 1941-0921 for the online edition, matching the live Journals World record for this title, where the journal appears under the fuller name Sports Health A Multidisciplinary Approach. The subtitle is a statement of method: the journal exists to give sports-medicine clinicians the science and clinical data for a comprehensive diagnosis and treatment approach to sports injuries and conditions across all ages, from paediatrics to geriatrics, in the words of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's description of the title.

The journal is a collaborative publication. SAGE describes it as a collaborative publication of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM), the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine (AMSSM), the National Athletic Trainers' Association (NATA) and the American Academy of Sports Physical Therapy (AASPT). The AOSSM description puts the combined reach at nearly seventy thousand subscribers drawn from those organisations. That partnership structure explains the journal's character: it is written for the whole team that trains and treats athletes, not for one profession within it.

Its editor-in-chief is Edward M. Wojtys of the University of Michigan, identified in that role by SAGE, the AOSSM and bibliographic records alike. Under his direction, with associate editors and an editorial board drawn from the partner societies, the journal publishes clinical reviews, didactic features and original research in a format intended to promote an evidence-based, multidisciplinary approach. For a clinician deciding how to manage an anterior cruciate ligament injury, a concussion, a throwing shoulder or a stress fracture, Sports Health aims to be the journal that assembles the orthopaedic, primary-care, rehabilitation and athletic-training perspectives in one place.

This profile is based on the publisher's and partner societies' own descriptions of the journal, on its bibliographic record, and on attributed indexing and metric sources, each identified in the text. Where sources report different years for the same metric, the year is given with the figure, because sports-medicine metrics move quickly and an undated number would mislead.

Journal at a Glance

A note on the ISSN order prevents a common cataloguing slip. Bibliographic records list the print ISSN as 1941-7381 and the web or online ISSN as 1941-0921. The live Journals World record lists the pair as 1941-0921 and 1941-7381, which is the same pair in the opposite order. Either way, both numbers belong to this journal and to no other.

The partner list has evolved in wording over the journal's life. Older SAGE package descriptions name additional or differently styled partners, including the Sports Physical Therapy Section under its earlier name, while current SAGE and AOSSM descriptions name the four societies given in the fact box. Authors and librarians should use the current partner list from the publisher's present page when describing the journal, and treat older package copy as historical.

History and Development

Sports Health was established in 2009, comparatively recently for a journal that now sits in the front rank of sports-medicine titles. Its launch recognised a structural change in the field: athlete care had become genuinely team-based, yet the literature remained split among orthopaedic journals read by surgeons, primary-care journals read by team physicians, and rehabilitation and athletic-training journals read by the clinicians who deliver most day-to-day care. A single journal owned in partnership by the societies representing those groups was the publishing answer to that split.

The journal grew with the evidence base of sports medicine itself. The 2010s brought large cohort studies of ligament reconstruction outcomes, successive international consensus statements on concussion, expanding work on injury prevention programmes, and growing attention to the female athlete, the masters athlete and mental health in sport. Sports Health's review-led format, in which experts synthesise a topic for practising clinicians, fitted that moment well, and its citation standing rose steadily: bibliometric series for the journal show its impact rising from below one in the early 2010s to the range between roughly three and four in recent years.

By the mid-2020s the journal's reported figures include a five-year impact factor of 3.7 in the AOSSM's description and a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 3.1 reported in Wolters Kluwer's Ovid journal listing, which also names Edward M. Wojtys as editor and SAGE as publisher. Different years and different compilations give different single numbers, as the metrics section explains, but the direction and the journal's position in the upper part of the sports-medicine field are consistent across sources.

Publisher and Owning Society

SAGE Publications publishes the journal from its sports-medicine and orthopaedics list, alongside the partner societies' flagship titles. SAGE provides the submission, production, hosting and library-distribution infrastructure, while the societies provide the readership, the reviewer community and much of the editorial leadership. That division is the standard modern society-journal arrangement, executed here at unusual scale because four societies share one title.

The AOSSM's journal page gives a sense of that scale, describing a collaborative bimonthly publication with nearly seventy thousand subscribers across the four organisations and directing readers to the editorial board led by the editor-in-chief and his team of associate editors. For advertisers, librarians and authors alike, that built-in professional audience is a material fact about the journal: a clinically useful review in Sports Health is placed directly before a large share of the practising sports-medicine community in the United States.

Scope and Subject Coverage

SAGE lists the journal's topics directly, and they define scope for authors: sports injury and treatment, care of the athlete, athlete rehabilitation, medical issues in the athlete, surgical techniques in sports medicine, case studies in sports medicine, images in sports medicine, legal issues, paediatric athletes, general sports trauma and sports psychology. The sections below explain what each strand means in practice.

Sports injury, diagnosis and treatment

The core strand covers the diagnosis and management of the injuries clinicians actually meet: ligament, tendon, cartilage, muscle and bone injuries of knee, shoulder, elbow, hip, ankle and spine. Reviews typically organise a condition by presentation, imaging, non-operative care, operative options and return-to-play criteria, which is the sequence a treating clinician needs. Original research in this strand includes cohort and comparative studies of treatments and outcomes.

Care of the athlete and medical issues

Team physicians and primary-care sports specialists are served by coverage of the athlete as a patient: concussion and head injury, cardiac screening and sudden cardiac events, heat illness, asthma and respiratory issues, skin and infectious problems in team settings, eating and energy-availability disorders, and the medical management of training and competition. This strand is where the AMSSM partnership shows most clearly, and it distinguishes the journal from purely surgical titles.

Rehabilitation and athletic training

Rehabilitation content, serving physical therapists and athletic trainers, covers post-injury and post-surgical protocols, functional testing, criteria-based progression, injury-prevention programmes such as neuromuscular training, and load management. The NATA and AASPT partnerships anchor this strand. A rehabilitation paper in Sports Health is expected to be usable in the clinic and training room, with progressions and criteria stated explicitly rather than described in general terms.

Surgical techniques

Surgical-technique articles describe operative approaches in sports medicine, including arthroscopic techniques for knee, shoulder, elbow and ankle, with the indications, steps, pitfalls and post-operative rehabilitation that determine whether a technique succeeds. These pieces function as continuing education for surgeons and as the reference against which rehabilitation colleagues plan post-operative care, which is why the journal pairs technique with rehabilitation so often.

Special populations and settings

Paediatric athletes receive dedicated coverage, recognising that growth-plate injuries, apophyseal conditions and early specialisation raise questions adult literature cannot answer. Coverage extends across age groups to geriatric and masters athletes, consistent with the journal's stated span from paediatrics to geriatrics, and to settings from school and collegiate sport to professional teams. Sports psychology and legal issues, both on the publisher's topic list, address mental health, performance and the medicolegal duties of team clinicians.

Images, cases and short formats

Alongside reviews and original research, SAGE lists case studies, images, short updates, legal briefs, editorials and letters among the journal's article types. Image and case formats capture the unusual presentation or the striking scan, updates keep clinicians current between major reviews, and legal briefs translate courtroom and regulatory developments into practice guidance. These shorter forms are part of why the journal works as a practising clinician's regular read rather than only as an archive for researchers.

Article Types and What the Journal Publishes

The journal publishes review articles, original research articles, case studies, images, short updates, legal briefs, editorials and letters to the editor, in the publisher's own enumeration. Reviews and didactic features are central, not decorative: the AOSSM describes the journal as publishing clinical reviews, didactic features and original research in a format that promotes an evidence-based, multidisciplinary approach.

That mix should guide authors' expectations. A submission is judged on clinical usefulness as well as methodological soundness. Original research should state its implication for practice plainly; a review should be systematic in its searching, current in its evidence and decisive in its recommendations where the evidence permits; a technique paper should be reproducible from its description. Work that is technically competent but leaves the practising reader unsure what to do differently is off the journal's centre of gravity.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

Editorial leadership rests with Edward M. Wojtys as editor-in-chief, supported by associate editors and an editorial board whose membership the AOSSM page directs readers to, and which is drawn from the partner societies' communities. Board composition across orthopaedics, primary care sports medicine, athletic training and physical therapy mirrors the journal's intended authorship and readership, so a rehabilitation manuscript is handled within a system that includes rehabilitation expertise.

Peer review follows SAGE journal procedures. Authors should consult the SAGE journal page and its author instructions for current requirements on study reporting, ethics approvals, trial registration where applicable, patient consent for images and cases, and disclosure of conflicts and funding. Sports-medicine research frequently involves identifiable athlete images, team affiliations and industry relationships with device manufacturers; handling those disclosures correctly at submission is part of professional practice in this field, not an administrative afterthought.

Open Access, Fees and Licensing

Sports Health is a subscription journal with the hybrid open-access options typical of SAGE titles, rather than a fully open-access journal. Most readers reach it through society membership, institutional libraries or the partner societies' member access arrangements, which is one reason its effective clinical reach is larger than ordinary subscription figures suggest. Authors who require or prefer open access, for example under a funder mandate, should check the current SAGE page for the journal's present open-access route and charge at submission time; no charge figure is asserted in this profile because SAGE maintains those figures and revises them.

Clinicians without any of those routes will find many Sports Health reviews summarised, cited and discussed in guidelines, consensus statements and educational material across sports medicine, so the journal's synthesis work influences practice well beyond its subscriber base.

Indexing, Metrics and Visibility

Attributed metric sources agree that the journal stands in the upper part of its field. The AOSSM reports a five-year impact factor of 3.7. Wolters Kluwer's Ovid listing reports a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 3.1, attributing it to Journal Citation Reports. Secondary compilations that draw on Journal Citation Reports and SCImago report a 2025 impact figure around 3.8, a SCImago Journal Rank around 1.264 and an h-index of 83, with SJR values above 1.1 across recent years. These figures differ because they refer to different years, windows and compilations; this profile attributes each figure to its source and year instead of merging them into a single invented number.

Indexing reported for the journal includes Scopus, PubMed, Embase and related biomedical services, with bibliographic records also noting CAB International and SafetyLit among its abstracting sources. That combination matters practically: PubMed presence puts its reviews in front of every clinician who searches the biomedical literature, and Scopus presence supports its standing in institutional evaluation. Authors should still verify a specific database listing live if a formal requirement depends on it.

Trajectory is the other fact worth recording. The journal's impact rose from well under one in its early years to the three-to-four range in the 2020s, a climb that tracks its establishment as a first-choice review venue. A young journal, founded in 2009, reaching and holding that position in a competitive clinical field is a substantial publishing achievement by its societies and publisher.

Readership and Who Should Follow This Journal

SAGE defines the audience as all medical professionals involved in the training and care of competitive or recreational athletes, including primary care physicians, orthopaedic surgeons, physical therapists, athletic trainers and other medical and health-care professionals. That list is the multidisciplinary promise made concrete, and nearly seventy thousand society subscribers give it scale.

Different readers use the journal differently. A team physician reads for medical issues and return-to-play frameworks; a surgeon for technique and outcomes; a therapist or trainer for rehabilitation progressions and prevention programmes; a researcher for the state of a question before designing a study. A well-built Sports Health article serves at least two of those readers at once, which is a useful test for authors revising a draft.

For trainees, the journal's reviews are an efficient education in sports medicine's core conditions, because each review is written to be applied. Many residency and fellowship reading lists draw on exactly this kind of synthesis, which extends the journal's influence into training programmes.

Recent Themes and Examples From the Journal

Recent content follows the topic map the publisher publishes: consensus-informed reviews of common injuries, rehabilitation progressions, medical issues from concussion to heat illness, paediatric topics, and technique updates. In a field where international consensus statements periodically reset practice, as with concussion, a review journal attached to the major societies is where many clinicians first work through what changed and what it means for their own protocols.

The journal also reflects the field's widening concerns: mental health and sports psychology, legal duties of team clinicians, care of the ageing athlete and prevention programmes that reduce injury incidence at population level. Those strands, present in the publisher's own topic list, show a journal whose definition of sports health matches its title, the health of people who play sport, in full, rather than only the surgery of their injuries.

How to Submit: A Step-by-Step Guide for Authors

Authors submit through SAGE's online system for the journal, following the author instructions on the SAGE journal page, which govern article categories, formatting, reporting standards and declarations. Begin by choosing the correct category, review, original research, case study, image, update or another listed type, since expectations and length differ by category and a strong piece in the wrong category will be returned for reframing.

For a review, show the search behind the synthesis, prefer current primary evidence and guidelines, resolve disagreements in the literature explicitly where possible, and end sections with what the clinician should do. For original research, report design, participants, interventions and outcomes to the standard reporting guideline for the design, register trials where required, and state the practice implication in the abstract and discussion. For rehabilitation work, give the protocol in reproducible detail, exercises, dosage, progression criteria and return-to-sport testing, because readers will use it directly.

Handle ethics and permissions before submission: institutional approval for human research, consent for identifiable images and cases, and full disclosure of industry relationships and funding, which matter acutely in device-related sports-medicine research. Check the journal's recent issues for genuinely similar articles; Sports Health publishes reviews on core topics periodically, and a proposal that duplicates a recent review without a material update will struggle.

How to Judge Whether Your Work Fits

Work fits when it improves the care of athletes in a way a multidisciplinary clinical team can use: a clearer diagnostic pathway, a better-supported treatment choice, a reproducible rehabilitation progression, a prevention programme with evidence, or a synthesis that settles how a condition should be managed now. Work centred on any partner profession fits, provided it speaks to the wider team.

Work fits poorly when it is basic science with no articulated clinical path, a single-specialty technical report that ignores rehabilitation and return-to-play, or a review that summarises without judging the evidence. Elite-performance work with no health or care dimension also sits at the edge of scope; the journal's centre is health in sport, not performance science alone.

Strengths, Limitations and Points to Verify

Strengths include four-society backing with a combined audience the AOSSM puts at nearly seventy thousand subscribers, an experienced editor-in-chief, a clear multidisciplinary identity that matches how athlete care is actually delivered, strong and rising citation standing with PubMed and Scopus indexing, and a format that privileges clinical usefulness. For a review or a clinically framed study, few sports-medicine venues offer a more direct route to practising clinicians.

Limitations are the ordinary ones of a subscription society journal: most content sits behind membership or library access, competition for review slots on popular topics is real, and metric figures vary by source and year, so any single number quoted without its year and source should be treated with caution, including in promotional material. Authors needing guaranteed open access should confirm the current SAGE arrangement before submitting.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes Sports Health?

SAGE Publications, as a collaborative publication of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine, the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine, the National Athletic Trainers' Association and the American Academy of Sports Physical Therapy.

When was it founded and how often does it appear?

It was established in 2009 and is published bimonthly, six issues a year.

Who edits it?

Edward M. Wojtys of the University of Michigan is editor-in-chief, supported by associate editors and an editorial board drawn from the partner societies.

What are its ISSNs?

Print ISSN 1941-7381 and online ISSN 1941-0921.

What is its impact factor?

Sources differ by year: the AOSSM reports a five-year impact factor of 3.7, and Wolters Kluwer's Ovid listing reports a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 3.1. Treat any figure as belonging to its stated year and source.

Where is it indexed?

Indexing reported for the journal includes Scopus, PubMed and Embase, with CAB International and SafetyLit also noted in bibliographic records.

Verification Notes for This Profile

This profile was prepared from the SAGE journal description, the AOSSM journal page, Wolters Kluwer's Ovid listing, bibliographic records for the title's history and ISSN assignment, and attributed metric compilations, together with the live Journals World record showing SAGE as publisher and ISSNs 1941-0921 and 1941-7381. Sources are listed in the accompanying sources file.

Two apparent discrepancies are explained rather than hidden. The ISSN pair appears in opposite orders in different records; both orders refer to the same print and online pair. The partner-society list differs between older package descriptions and current SAGE and AOSSM pages; this profile follows the current four-society list and notes the older wording as historical.