Para archery research: Puce 2024 scoping review

This is a review that counts and sorts what has been published on Paralympic archery and shooting, without judging the quality of the individual studies. Twenty-four studies remain at the end, covering 483 athletes in total: 299 in shooting and 184 in archery. Seven papers deal with para-archery alone, thirteen with para-shooting alone and four with both disciplines.

The topics are spread very unevenly. Nine studies measure physiological responses, six deal with building a classification on measured grounds, four with new devices and technologies, three with psychological and social aspects, one with kinematics and biomechanics, one with the epidemiology of injury and illness. In adaptive archery the figures for maximal oxygen uptake are all old and based on very few athletes: 1.5 litres a minute in four men with paraplegia, 1.6 in two, 1.4 in a single archer, lower than the values reported in other Paralympic sports. The only kinematic study compares four archers from the wheelchair class with three from the standing class: the former took longer to complete the draw and moved their body centre back and forth more.

The only work on a large group is the illness study at the Tokyo 2020 Games: 139 Paralympic archers, with 4.8 illnesses per 1,000 athlete days (confidence interval 2.6 to 8.7), slightly above the average of the disciplines covered. The author counts show how small the field is. The review identifies 97 researchers linked by 328 co-authorship ties and 18 separate groups; the two most prolific have six papers each, four authors account for a quarter of the literature and 93.8% of those who have written on these topics did so once only. The first article dates from 1979, and nine of the twenty-four, that is 37.5%, have appeared since 2020.

The authors follow Arksey and O'Malley's five-step method for scoping reviews, adding a bibliometric analysis and a reading of sport policy under the PAGER framework. The question was built with the Joanna Briggs Institute's population, concept and context mnemonic: eligible studies were original investigations of athletes with any type of impairment, physical, visual or intellectual, competing in adaptive shooting disciplines.

The search string joined fifteen expressions with the OR operator, from "paralympic shooting" to "adaptive archery", and was run on PubMed and MEDLINE, Scopus, Web of Science, OvidSP and EMBASE from inception to 1 April 2023; grey literature was searched on Google Scholar. The search returned 609 records, 35 were duplicates, 574 were screened by title and abstract, 544 were discarded as irrelevant and eleven were excluded with a stated reason listed in a table, among them two conference abstracts and two reviews. Another five papers came from Google Scholar, for a total of 24. Selection and data extraction were carried out independently by two authors, with agreement between them measured by a kappa above 0.90. From each study the authors extracted the design, the journal and its impact factor, the subject area, the number and characteristics of the participants, the aim and the main finding. No quality appraisal was carried out, and the authors explain why: in a scoping review it is not mandatory, because the aim is to measure the extent of a field rather than the worth of individual studies. The bibliometric section was built with VOSviewer, Gephi and Cytoscape, calculating network indicators such as the number of nodes, links, clusters, density and path length.

The main limit is a declared one: none of the 24 studies was appraised for quality, so a single table puts a cohort of 4,110 athletes at the Games on the same footing as a single case. The difference matters a great deal, because most of the work on adaptive archery covers one, two or four people, and three quarters of the 184 archers in the total come from that one Tokyo cohort of 139. The search stopped in April 2023 and, although no language filter was applied in the databases, inclusion required papers in English; five of the 24 came from Google Scholar, that is through the grey literature channel.

Some of the paper's own numbers do not hold. The table of author connections reports a network diameter of 1, a radius of 1, a characteristic path length of 1, a clustering coefficient of 1, a density of 1 and a heterogeneity of 0, values that cannot be squared with the fragmented, poorly connected community the authors describe from them. The count of disciplines at the Games is given as 23 in one place and 21 in another. The sentence about illness at Tokyo swaps the two disciplines: it says the rate for archery was among the highest, citing 6.1 per 1,000 athlete days, and then that the rate for archers was slightly above average, citing 4.8, whereas the table aligns 6.1 with shooting and 4.8 with archery. Finally, the bibliometric network describes the authors of the 24 included studies only, not everyone working in the field.

For an archer or a coach in para-archery, the main use of this review is finding out what has not been studied. There is a single piece of biomechanics, on seven athletes in all, split between the wheelchair class and the standing class; on training methods there is nothing, and the authors say so plainly; on equipment adaptation there are three single cases, a bespoke jacket, a laser target controller and some optical aids for shooting. Anyone looking for technical guidance will therefore find very little, and the little there is often concerns shooting rather than archery.

A second useful point is that the findings on classification, which at first glance look relevant to archery as well, all come from shooting with visual impairment: there, five studies found no relationship between the degree of visual impairment and performance. Archery has nothing equivalent. On physiological responses, the maximal oxygen uptake data are ancient, from 1979 to 1999, on groups of one to four athletes, and serve as a reference for nobody. The firmest number in the whole review is the illness rate at the Tokyo Games, collected on 139 archers over fifteen days, which the authors use to argue that prevention deserves attention in these athletes.