Call for papers:
Special Issue on Complex Systems and Sports
Journal of Systems Science and Complexity
AIMS and SCOPE
Complex networks are networks with non-trivial topological features (scale-free degree distribution, high clustering coefficient or small-world properties). They sit at the edge of chaos between regular lattices and fully random networks, and can capture many natural and social phenomena, e.g., gene interactions or social relationships. In particular, team sports have a strong network component, since they are essentially a network developed along time and space, with nodes being players and links being passes and other interactions. The network paradigm allows for a strong quantitative description of a whole match, while at the same time offers some insight on how performance is achieved. This could result, eventually, in a prediction of game outcome according to network characteristics. Complex networks, and thus emergent behavior, appear also in other aspects: transfers, and even sports support and interaction among them.
Complex networks are an example of complex systems, a paradigm that has been applied in the past to sports and which is the focus of this special issue. There are many aspects in the dynamics of sports (related to scoring or performance) that can be analyzed from this general perspective in order to
model the game, find hidden patterns and phase transitions, etc. From an even more general viewpoint, the analysis can be extended beyond the actual game dynamics and tackle other sport-related issues: transfer networks, sport fans networks and their dynamics, etc. Submissions dealing with the use of complex systems in this context are welcome.
Related topics thus include (but are not limited to):
- Complex networks in team-sport games
- Networks of teams
- Transfer networks
- Relationship between economics and complex networks in sports
- Sports fans networks and their dynamics
- Complex systems analysis and simulation of robotics sports
- In general, anything that bridges the gap between complex systems and sports
- Agent-based models of sport games
- Complex systems and sports physiology
Both theoretical and applied works related to the topics of the special issue are sought. The target audience of the special issue is composed of computer, social and sports scientists, interested in unravelling the dynamics and emergent patterns of games in team sports.
ABOUT JSSC
The Journal of Systems Science and Complexity is a quarterly journal indexed in the Science Citation Index (impact factor = 0.564 in 2010).
Further information at the journal’s web site
IMPORTANT DATES
Submission of papers: January 20th, 2012
Notification of acceptance: March 31st, 2012
Final versions due: April 30th, 2012
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
The manuscript should be written in English with an informative abstract of no more than 200 words and 5 key words maximum. The manuscript should be concise and grammatically correct. It should be typed double-spaced and include an abbreviated title with no more than 40 English characters for the running head. Authors are requested to type all letters and mathematical symbols clearly. References should be cited in the text with numerals in square brackets, e.g. [3]. All references should appear and be numbered in a separate bibliography at the end of the paper. Papers should be typeset in LaTeX (or AMSTeX, TeX).
Please, submit a PDF version of the paper through this web form
If you have any question, please address it to sports.jssc (at) gmail (dot) com
EDITORS
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J.J. Merelo ,
Universidad de Granada, Spain
A.M. Mora ,
Universidad de Granada, Spain
C. Cotta ,
Universidad de Malaga, Spain.
GeNeura Team 