Motricidade © Edições Desafio Singular
2017, vol. 13, n. 3, pp. 1-3 http://dx.doi.org/10.6063/motricidade.13551
* Corresponding author: Research Center in Sports Sciences, Health Sciences & Human Development, CIDESD,
Vila Real, Portugal. E-mail: pedro.guedes.carvalho@gmail.com
Comparative Studies for What?
Pedro Guedes de Carvalho
*
EDITORIAL
ISCPES stands for International Society for
Comparative Physical Education and Sports and it is
going to celebrate its 40
th
anniversary in 2018. Since
the beginning (Israel 1978) the main goals of the
Society were established under a worldwide mind set
considering five continents and no discrimination of
any kind. The founders wanted to compare Physical
Education and Sports across the world, searching for
the best practices deserving consideration and
applied on the purpose of improving citizen quality of
life. The mission still stands for “Compare to learn
and improve”.
As all the organizations lasting for 39 years,
ISCPES experienced several vicissitudes, usually
correlated with world economic cycles, social and
sports changes, which are in ISS journal articles -
International Sport Studies.
ISS journal is Scopus indexed, aiming to improve
its quality (under evaluation) to reach more qualified
students, experts, professionals and researchers;
doing so it will raise its indexation, which we know
it is nowadays a more difficult task. First, because
there are more journals trying to compete on this
academic fierce competitive market; secondly,
because the basic requirements are getting more and
more hard to gather in the publishing environment
around Physical Education and Sports issues.
However, we can promise this will be one of our main
strategic goals.
Another goal I would like to address on this
Editorial is the language issue. We have this second
strategic goal, which is to reach most of languages
spoken in different continents; besides the English
language, we will reach Chinese, Spanish and
Portuguese speaking countries. For that reason, we
already defined that all the abstracts in English will
be translated into Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese
words so people can find them on any search browser.
That will expand the demand for our journal and
articles, increasing the number of potential readers.
Of course this opportunity, given by Motricidade, can
be considered as a good example to multiply our
scope.
In June 2017 we organized a joint Conference in
Borovets, Bulgaria, with our colleagues from the
BCES – Bulgarian Society for Comparative
Educational Studies. During those days, there was an
election to appoint a new (Portuguese) president.
This constitutes an important step for the Portuguese
speaker countries, which, for a 4
th
year term, will have
the opportunity to expand the influence of ISCPES
Society diffusing the research results we have been
achieving into a vast extended new public and
inviting new research experts to innovative debates.
This new president will be working with a wide
geographical diverse team: the Vice President coming
from a South American country (Venezuela), and the
other several Executive Board members are coming
from Brazil, China, Africa and North America. This
constitutes a very favorable situation once, adding to
this, we kept the previous editorial team from
Australia and Europe. We are definitely committed to
improve our influence through new incentives to
organize several regional (continental) workshops,
seminars and Conferences in the next future.
The international research is crossing troubled
times with exponential number of new indexed
journals trying to get new influence and visibility. In
order to do that, readers face new challenges because
several studies present contradictory conclusions and
outcome comparisons still lacking robust
methodologies. Uncovering these issues is the focus
of our Society.
In the past, ISCPES started its activity collecting
answers to the same questions asked to several
experts in different countries and continents across
the world. The starting studies developed some
important insights on several issues concerning the
way Physical Education professionals approached
their challenges. In the very starting documents