Information about Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) has been recognized as essential knowledge in academia. The aim of this paper was to provide background, relevant issues, and controversial perspectives for the SCI and SSCI as well as their derived evaluation systems to researchers in physical education, sport, and exercise. Limitations and suggestions for the future research of SCI and SSCI were also provided. SCI and SSCI were used to evaluate the quality of journals, systematically and objectively. SCI and SSCI were also derived a variety of evaluation indices where impact factor (IF), category ranking (CR), and timed cited (TC) could function as potential standards for evaluating academic performance. In addition, researchers in physical education, sport, and exercise have increased participating multidisciplinary research. Lastly, improving ability of academic English writing, thinking internationally, understanding the meaning of each evaluation index, and submitting research to the higher quality journal could be considered as the future directions.