Systematic Review Exploring Trends in Islamic Education Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Islamic Education has a critical role in various aspects of the lives of individuals, societies, and Muslims as a whole; the main objective of this study is to update the current knowledge frontiers around investigations related to research trends on Islamic Education and identify the main research topics and analyze their evolution over time. Bibliometric analysis has been applied in this article: we retrieved 1032 academic articles related to Islamic Education from Scopus after some data cleaning and preparation steps. The R package "Bibliometrix" was mainly used to analyze this content. Our study has two parts, and the performance analysis contains five categories (Annual Scientific Production, Most Relevant Sources, Most Productive Authors, Most Cited Publications, and Most Relevant Keywords). Science mapping includes country collaboration analysis and thematic analysis. We analyze thematic maps by dividing the entire bibliographic dataset into four quadrants to present thematic evolution over time. This study is one of the most comprehensive bibliometric reviews analyzing Islamic education-related studies. We explain how the results will benefit the understanding of academic research interests to improve the quality of current research on Islamic Education.