The phenomenon of esports in scientific research: bibliometric analysis

The article presents some results of the study of the problem of improving the efficiency of managing the development of esports in Russia in the period 2019-2021. For the purposes of forming the conceptual and categorical apparatus of esports, the article provides a systematic review of the existing literature on esports and its evolution in various branches of knowledge. During the research, a systematic approach was used, as well as such methods as analysis, synthesis, generalization. Bibliometric analysis is chosen as a method of systematic review of the literature. With its help, the literature corpus of 134 scientific articles published in English and presented in the Scopus database was analyzed. The analysis using the developed methodology was performed on a number of metrics: 1) the country of residence of the author, 2) the year of publication, the journal, 3) the field of research, 4) the citation of articles in dynamics for 2006-2021. For data collection and preprocessing, the Python 3.8 programming language, the Jupyter-notebook development environment, as well as a number of libraries are used. Visualization of the analysis results is implemented in the Microsooft Excel 2019 software. As a result of the research, the main characteristics and trends of the development of scientific thought in the field under study are revealed. The conclusion is made about the special interest of scientists in the field of computer and social sciences in this problem. Economic studies of esports are presented by individual works. The subject of the analyzed research is mainly the evolution of esports and esports events, the stages and reasons for its development, concepts and concepts related to it. So far, there are only a limited number of articles on the problem of management and regulation of esports, esports marketing. The phenomenon of esports was studied mainly in the countries that are leaders in the formation of this industry and the development of the esports market (USA, China, Russia, South Korea). The top 10 scientific articles were determined by the number of citations in this period, which allowed us to determine the most authoritative studies of the problem of esports. The conclusions of the study contribute to the development of the theory of sports management in terms of understanding the phenomenon of esports, which contributes to the expansion of ideas about the content and features of managerial relations that develop in the field of regulation of esports activities.