International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance (IJSPP)

Volume 1/Number 1/March 2006. Human Kinetics. 72 pages. ISSN 1555-0265. Quarterly subscription: individual, £41 p.a., institution £145, students £30. Also available online.

Scientific journals are an absolute necessity. Without them many of the researchers whose work they publish would have no occupation, and none would have any means of getting promotion. Publish or be damned. To be fair, many (perhaps even most?) research projects set out to find out something worth knowing: relatively few scientific breakthroughs occur as a result of cosmic, earth-shattering insight, but from the incremental accumulation of knowledge hard won – and somebody has to win it.

IJSPP is the latest addition to Human Kinetics' shelf of 20 journals. It sets out to do just what it says on the cover: publish authoritative research in sports physiology. It is peer-reviewed and publishes original papers, reviews, commentaries, technical notes and editorials. The editor is David Pyne, Australian Institute of Sport, and the board is a who's who of current sports science research.

Unlike some of the medical journals, it's performance-specific. Research in this issue looks at rugby players, swimmers, water-polo players, distance runners, and cyclists. While the content is unequivocally scientific, a good deal of the material is accessible to coaches, particularly the analysis of persistent fatigue (that is, overtraining) in a woman sprint cyclist so severe that her trained performance fell below what she achieved untrained .