The study, conducted by Joseph Lobo of Bulacan State University in the Philippines and INTI International University in Malaysia, combined bibliometric mapping with thematic synthesis. Bibliometric analysis is a quantitative technique that treats scholarly publications as data points, tracking citation patterns, keyword co-occurrence, and collaboration networks to reveal the intellectual structure of a research field. Using tools such as the R-based bibliometrix package and VOSviewer, Lobo charted how the literature on sport media has clustered, expanded, and reoriented itself as platforms like Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Douyin reshaped the way sporting content reaches audiences.

The central conceptual finding is deceptively simple but far-reaching: sport media is no longer understood as a neutral channel that transmits games to viewers. Instead, the review argues, it should be seen as a system through which sporting narratives acquire authority, circulate through platforms, generate audience and commercial value, and produce unequal representational consequences. In this framing, visibility itself becomes the object of study — not merely a byproduct of coverage but a resource that is produced, distributed, monetized, and contested.

To organize this sprawling literature, the review identifies what it calls platformed visibility as an integrative lens. The term captures how digital platforms now mediate nearly every stage of sport communication, from a journalist’s source gathering to an athlete’s carefully curated self-presentation to a fan’s decision to share a highlight clip. The author proposes a four-part cross-disciplinary agenda built around this lens: production and authority, circulation and amplification, participation and valuation, and representation and unequal consequences. Each pillar connects previously separate research streams that rarely cited one another despite addressing overlapping phenomena.

The first pillar, production and authority, encompasses work on sport journalism’s changing power dynamics. Studies in this cluster trace how newsroom hierarchies, described through the sociological lens of field theory, have been destabilized by social media adoption, in-house club reporters, and automated content. Recent scholarship has examined attitudes toward artificial intelligence in sports writing, the metajournalistic discourse surrounding generative AI at outlets such as Sports Illustrated, and the defensive mediatization strategies that sports organizations deploy to control their own messaging. Together these studies document a profession negotiating its boundaries as clubs, leagues, and athletes increasingly bypass traditional gatekeepers.

The second pillar, circulation and amplification, addresses how content moves through platform architectures. Research here ranges from analyses of how smaller European football leagues carve out niches in digital plenitude — the condition of content abundance that followed the era of broadcast scarcity — to studies of video assistant referee technology intensifying mediatization in small-nation contexts. The underlying insight is that circulation is not neutral: algorithms, engagement metrics, and platform affordances systematically favor some narratives, leagues, and athletes over others, making amplification a structural rather than incidental phenomenon.

Participation and valuation, the third pillar, covers the enormous literature on athlete branding and fan engagement. Studies have examined how athletes build brand image on Instagram through source credibility signaling, how visual self-presentation differs by gender among Olympic athletes, and how fan responses to brand attributes translate into engagement on social platforms. Work on content strategy for clubs, message optimization using artificial intelligence to predict consumer response, and comparative analyses of posting frequency across football leagues all converge on a commercial question: how does attention convert into economic value for athletes, teams, and sponsors?

The fourth pillar, representation and unequal consequences, is where the review’s critical edge becomes most visible. This tradition, rooted in media sociology and feminist and cultural studies, documents persistent inequities in who is rendered visible. Foundational studies from the mid-2010s exposed a quarter century of women’s sports exclusion from televised news, later evolving into analyses of gender-bland sexism in highlight shows. More recent work examines sexualization, misogyny, and gender-based violence directed at sportswomen online, comparative toxicity targeting male and women sports reporters, and representations of disability that frame Paralympic athletes as inspirational or charity-worthy rather than as competitors. Studies of race and ethnicity in televised football and of whiteness in Spanish sports journalism production extend the critique to national and racial hierarchies.

Crucially, the review finds that these critical and commercial traditions have developed largely in parallel, with limited cross-citation. Management-oriented studies of fan engagement rarely engage with feminist analyses of athlete self-representation, even when both examine the same Instagram posts. The author argues that platformed visibility can bridge this gap because it forces every study — whether measuring engagement metrics or interpreting representation — to confront the same underlying question of who benefits from being seen and who remains invisible. The review also highlights emerging research on non-Western contexts, including studies of lesbian athletes coming out in non-Western news outlets, social media and sports journalism in Zimbabwe, Chinese Olympic athletes’ self-presentation on Douyin, and African media coverage of the Commonwealth Games, which challenge the field’s Anglophone center of gravity.

Looking forward, the review calls for comparative, multilingual, Global South-centered, cross-platform, longitudinal, and multi-method inquiry to explain how media institutions, platforms, markets, audiences, and social inequalities jointly shape contemporary sport visibility. The methodological recommendation is significant: because platform dynamics change rapidly and bibliometric snapshots capture only indexed literature, the field needs designs that follow phenomena over time and across linguistic and geographic boundaries. As sport’s attention economy continues to concentrate visibility in the hands of platforms, algorithms, and a small set of globally marketable athletes, the review suggests that understanding who gets seen, circulated, and valued is no longer a niche academic concern but a central question for anyone seeking to comprehend modern sport culture.

Subject of Research: A bibliometric and thematic review of platformed visibility in sport media research from 2015 to 2025

Article Title: ‘Who gets seen, circulated, and valued?’: a bibliometric and thematic review of platformed visibility in sport media (2015–2025)

Article References: Lobo, J. (2026). ‘Who gets seen, circulated, and valued?’: a bibliometric and thematic review of platformed visibility in sport media (2015–2025). SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 466. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01764-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01764-3

Keywords: sport media, platformed visibility, bibliometrics, sport journalism, athlete branding, fan engagement, social media, media sociology, gender representation, digital platforms, sport communication, Global South