Comparative Studies for What?

• Published in: Motricidade 2017-12, Vol.13 (3), p.1-3
• Main Author: de Carvalho, Pedro Guedes
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Comparative studies; Editorial; International organizations; Lifestyles; Physical education teachers; Professionals; Researchers; Society; Studies
• ISSN: 1646-107X; 2182-2972
• DOI: 10.6063/motricidade.13551

ISCPES stands for International Society for Comparative Physical Education and Sports and it is going to celebrate its 40th 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 4th year term, will have the opportunity to expand the influence of ISCPES Society diffusing the research results we have been