Investigating the Scientometrics of the Studies Conducted in the Field of Islam

Abstract

the present study investigated the status of the studies conducted in Islam’s field, employing scientometric methods. Extracted from Web of Science database, 6837 articles were surveyed for the growth rate, core journals, core authors, average citation rate, effective authors, countries’ contributions, lexical co-occurrence map, most frequent key terms, thematic domains and published formats. Ravar Matrix, USI Net and R environment were utilized to analyze the data. The findings indicated that the studies on Islam's field have had an ascending trend; studies are published more in article format, the average citation rate to the outputs in Islam's field shows a rise from 2008 to 2008 and a fall from 2008 to 2020; Christianity was the most frequent discussed subject in the studies on Islam’s field, key terms of “Islam”, Islamophobia” and “religion” were the most frequent key terms; Belhaj, Padela, and Prat are the most productive authors in the Islam's field; the journal ISLAM-ZEITSCHRIFT FUR GESCHICHTE UND KULTUR DES ranked first in publishing articles on Islam; and finally in terms of country, America received the first rank in publishing the outputs on Islam's field. Some suggestions are also presented by the researchers as to the implications of the research findings.