Physical Activity and Exercise: Text Mining Analysis

It is currently difficult to have a global state of the art vision of certain scientific topics. In the field of physical activity (PA) and exercise, this is due to information overload. The present study aims to provide a solution by analysing a large mass of scientific articles using text mining (TM). The purpose was to analyse what is being investigated in the PA health field on young people from primary, secondary and higher education. Titles and abstracts published in the Web of Science (WOS) database were analysed using TM on 24 November 2020, and after removing duplicates, 85,368 remained. The results show 9960 (unique) words and the most frequently used bi-grams and tri-grams. A co-occurrence network was also generated. ‘Health’ was the first term of importance and the most repeated bi-grams and tri-grams were ‘body_mass’ and ‘body_mass_index’. The analyses of the 20 topics identified focused on health-related terms, the social sphere, sports performance and research processes. It also found that the terms health and exercise have become more important in recent years.