Systematic Review Evolution of Islamic Law: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Islamic law has become one of the most popular areas of knowledge in academic research; the main objective of this study is to update the current knowledge boundaries around investigations related to the Evolution of Islamic Law, identify the main research topics, and analyze their evolution over time. Bibliometric analysis has been used in this article: we retrieved 82 academic articles related to the evolution of Islamic law from Scopus after several data cleaning and preparation steps. The R package "Bibliometrics" 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 highlight our thematic analysis by dividing the entire bibliographic dataset into three temporal periods to present thematic evolution over time. This study is one of the most comprehensive bibliometric reviews analyzing evolution-related studies. We explain how the results will benefit the understanding of current academic research interests in the evolutionary development of Islamic law.