Sedentary Behaviours Among Children: A Four Decade Bibliometric Analysis of Global Outlook

Abstract

The present study investigated the global overview of sedentary behaviour among children from 1982 - 2023 using a bibliometric evaluation approach from Scopus data set. The results retrieved from the investigation include author key words and keyword plus, key authors in the field, most relevant nations in terms of citation numbers and publications, leading institutions in the field, relevant journal source, and trending topics in the research niche among others. A sum of 2187 articles were retrieved from Scopus data set with an average citations per doc and co-authors per document ratio of 52.23 and 6.82, accordingly. Research on sedentary behaviour among children was correlated in line with the years span (R2 =0.7604; y = 4.9319x - 9824.1), which indicates increase in article numbers with increase in years. Australia was the leading nation with regards to article (n = 381) and citations (n = 22624) numbers. While UK and Canada were second and third (n = 324; n = 226) in publication and citation (n =22502; n = 17151) numbers, respectively. In addition, nations including Australia (n = 165), UK (n = 123), Canada (n = 69), Spain (n = 40),Netherlands (n = 30) and USA (n = 29) had the highest number of multiply country publications (MCP) with other nations, respectively. The most trending topics of author keywords in the field include; Physical activity, Sedentary behaviour, Children, Obesity, Screen time and Overweight among others. Scientifically advance and financially stable countries were observed to have higher research publications as compared to developing countries. The trending topics observed from this study suggests the direction of future research for policy makers, government parastatals, institutions and other stakeholders in addressing the issue of sedentary behaviours among children as a concern for public health.