Juliana M. Plucinik’s scientific contributions

Citation network analysis is a systematic technique that affords the synthesis of scholarship in a well-defined content area. In an effort to highlight the citation structure of research on parent–child interactions in youth sport, multiple databases were searched using all 12 combinations of the following keywords: (Level 1) “families,” “parents,” “fathers,” and “mothers”; (Level 2) “children,” “adolescents,” and “athletes”; and (Level 3) “sport.” A 3-step filtering approach (Jones, 2004; Meade & Richardson, 1997) driven by prespecified inclusion and exclusion criteria was used across 4 separate searches to consolidate the article population. This process yielded a final article population of 199 peer-reviewed publications across 77 peer-reviewed outlets since 1968. Descriptive analyses of the participants and publications highlighted a steady increase in publication frequency over the past 5 decades, with the vast majority of research having been conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Athletes participating across 37 unique sports were represented across the articles, with most sampling athletes aged 11 to 15 and/or their parents. Nearly 60% of articles used quantitative methodologies, with an increase in qualitative work occurring over the past decade. UCINET software was used to identify the most prominent (i.e., widely cited) articles, as well as cohesive subgroups of closely linked articles in the literature. The use of citation network analysis in the present study proved useful in identifying knowledge gaps in the research on parent–child interactions in youth sport, thus highlighting potentially fruitful paths for future empirical efforts.