Reading sports-science journals
How to weigh the venue
This is a reference page about the practice of reading the literature, not an empirical claim about running, so it carries no evidence grade. The point is simple: where a study appears is a weak signal about its quality, useful for calibration but never a substitute for reading the study itself.
Almost every claim in this knowledge base traces to a published paper, and a fair question is how much the journal it appeared in should count. The honest answer is: a little, as one input among several. A strong venue does not rescue a weak study, and a good study in a modest venue is still a good study. But the venue carries information, and knowing the landscape helps calibrate the reading, in the same spirit as evaluating supplements.
Where the trustworthy consensus lives
The most useful thing to recognise is the venue of a position stand or consensus statement, because these are the field’s attempt to summarise a whole literature rather than add one more trial. The ones this wiki leans on recur in a small set of places: the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition for the ISSN stands on caffeine, protein and beta-alanine; Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise and the joint ACSM, Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and Dietitians of Canada position stand for nutrition and athletic performance; and the British Journal of Sports Medicine for IOC consensus statements such as those on RED-S and dietary supplements. These are high-quality syntheses, though a consensus statement still reflects the evidence and the committee at the time it was written, not a permanent truth.
The applied and the clinical
Beyond the consensus venues, the primary trials cluster in a recognisable set of journals, each with a slant worth knowing. The British Journal of Sports Medicine leans clinical, toward injury, public health and sport medicine. The International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, the European Journal of Applied Physiology and the Journal of Applied Physiology run the applied and mechanistic physiology. Sports Medicine carries reviews and meta-analyses. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise spans the field as the American College of Sports Medicine’s journal. None of this decides whether a given study is any good, but it sets expectations for the kind of work and the typical rigour.
The publisher and the special-issue problem
The sharper caution concerns high-volume open-access publishers, because a large and growing share of sports-science papers now appears in them, and open-access status alone says nothing about quality. Several publishers have drawn sustained criticism over peer-review rigour, most of it centred on the special-issue model, where guest-edited collections are solicited aggressively and accepted very fast. Frontiers was placed on Beall’s list of possible predatory publishers in 2015, and in 2023 the French institute Inria labelled it a “grey-zone publisher” while Zhejiang Gongshang University excluded its articles, alongside those of MDPI and Hindawi, from researcher evaluation (Frontiers overview). An analysis of MDPI reached a similar “grey zone” verdict: much sound work is published, but the rapid special-issue route creates systematic quality risk a reader has to account for (Fränti 2024).
The practical rule follows from the mechanism, not the brand. A paper in a regular issue of one of these journals may be perfectly sound; a paper in a rapidly-accepted special issue deserves a closer look at its methods and at whether anyone has replicated it. This wiki cites plenty of Frontiers and MDPI papers where the underlying study is solid, and it should: the fix is to weight by the study, the peer-review route and independent replication, not to blacklist a publisher.
What this means for a claim
Put together, the venue is a starting filter, not a verdict. A consensus statement in a major journal is the strongest single citation a claim can carry; a single small trial in a fast-turnaround special issue is the weakest, and the more surprising the claim, the more it needs the former. Everything else sits between, and the only reliable move is to read the study: its sample, its design, its funding and whether it has been replicated. The journal tells you where to set your prior, and no more.