Marife Turkish Journal of Religious Studies

Abstract

Arabic is one of the leading languages internationally. One of the important reasons for this is that the main source of Islam is in this language. Activities such as reading, writing, reproducing and interpreting the Qur'an are directly related to the Arabic language. Therefore, some non-Arab Muslims, regardless of their worldly, commercial and social purposes, have attached much more importance to the reading, pronunciation and understanding of Arabic than their own language in order to understand the divine message. However, the large number of people whose mother tongue is Arabic and who speak Arabic brought the Arabic language an international impact in the fields of religion, history, culture and various fields. On the other hand, the work of Orientalists in the Islamic sciences has aroused the interest of Westerners in the Arabic language. The literature of the Arabic language, which is so popular, will of course have reflections in the academic field. We will try to reveal the level of academic studies in this field in terms of quantity and quality by implementing bibliometric analysis, which is a quantitative research method. Because examining the limited number of articles published in the field together can be achieved through systematic literature reviews. However, the bibliometric analysis method should be the preferred method when examining a large number of scientific data. With the previous opportunities, only the colophon information of such studies could be presented, but thanks to new developments, bibliometric analysis can be made, and studies can be evaluated on different levels. Bibliometric analysis is the only way to examine all scientific studies in the relevant field at the same time. This type of research enables the development of future research areas. Scientific analysis is a method to measure the distribution of scientific publications and to provide a quantitative analysis. This study aims to bibliometrically analyze all articles written in Arabic literature published in WoS since 1964. WoS has been growing rapidly in volume and offers many opportunities to reach stakeholders worldwide. However, the large amount of academic work on this site needs to be processed and evaluated for better utilization. In this way, it may be possible to evaluate the work done. This method of bibliometric analysis is widely used by scholars in quantitative fields, but it is also used in social sciences. Bibliometric analysis has started to be implemented in the field of theology and such studies have increased in number in the recent years. 313 academic publications and the relationships between them were quantitatively and bibliometrically analyzed. With this analysis, it was predicted that the studies carried out so far will guide the future research in the Arab literature. The data in the mentioned study were mostly obtained from articles in ESCI, AHCI, and SSCI indexes. A different method was used in the study at hand. The data were obtained from the WoS database. It was searched with the words “Arabic literature” as keywords, the data obtained from BibTex output were visualized using the R Studio Bibliometrix application, some results were visualized by creating new tables, and categorized into headings according to certain parameters for the questions of the research. The focus of this study is to seek answers to the questions “What is the place of research in Turkey on the Arabic literature among the studies in the world?” and to see what has been done so far in the research conducted in the field of Arabic literature at the international level, to make predictions and to contribute to the research to be conducted. It has been observed that important studies have been carried out in the field of Arabic literature in Turkey, but the contribution of these studies to the field is weak. An important reason for this is that these studies cannot be understood at the international level because they are in Turkish. What is the distribution of academic studies on Arabic literature according to years? Which authors are prominent in academic studies on Arabic literature? In which institutions have articles on Arabic literature been published? Which journals publishing in the field of Arabic literature are the most competent in the field? What is the level of international citation of academics who publish articles in the field of Arabic literature in Turkey? Answers to these questions will be looked for in articles. However, due to the large number of academic studies, it is not possible to make a detailed evaluation of the content and quality of these studies, as it would exceed the limits of the article, and only the abstracts of some of them are examined.