To assess the current body of knowledge on combat sports, the Amsterdam Combat Lab recently conducted a literature search on this topic within the Web of Science database. We searched for all English articles published since 1980, which contained a references to either specific combat sports or combat sports in general within the article title. This lead to an initial search result of 3,557 publications. By removal of duplicates and exclusion of some fields not in any way related to combat sports (such as archaeology or plant sciences), we narrowed this down to a list of 2,612 articles. Although we do do not claim this reference list to be fully accurate and complete, we gladly make it available to all researchers and students as a starting point to conduct literature research on specific topics in combat sports.
You can download our combat sports research library in RIS format (supported by most reference managers) here: Combat sports lit search 6 Oct 2017
Some initial exploration of this research library showed an exponential growth of the combat sports literature, especially over the last ten to fifteen years. The body of literature has grown from around 50 articles published per year between 2000 and 2005, to more than 250 articles in 2016. Most work seems to have been been conducted within the context of wrestling (563 publications), boxing (510) and judo (462), followed by taekwondo (223), karate (222) and fencing (158). Less work has been done in mixed martial arts (58), kickboxing (42), jiu jistu (40), kendo (35), kung fu (31) and aikido (27).
