205 articles on sport mental toughness from the Web of ScienceTM (SCIE、SSCI、A&HCI and ESCI) during the years of 2005-2017 are used as the data source, which is visually analyzed with CiteSpace V. The paper intends to clarify the disciplinary coupling of the researches on sport mental toughness and the distribution of the corresponding nations and authors. And through the analysis of the keywords of the study, it tries to find out the research hotspot collineation and evolution trend and present the research result with a knowledge map. The result shows that psychology and sports science enjoy priority in the research of sport mental toughness, and it is a compound academic group including pedagogy, sociology, sports medicine and neuroscience. Most of the literature in this field has been published in Britain, and great progress has been made in South Africa. The professors Gucciardi, Crust, Cowden and Crost from the different universities are the linchpin authors in this field. The popular research hot spots mainly include scaling, questionnaire, pressure handling, personality, etc. The study on the evolution trend is mainly based on the athletes' performance, from the relative characteristics of personality and the analysis of the past experience to the test and modification of the effectiveness of the measuring tools. During the recent years, exploring the relations between mental toughness and sports injury and the application of mental toughness to talent selection have also become the hot research topics. |