Religious and Islamic Literacy Among Youth in the Global Literacy Research Landscape: A Scopus-Based Bibliometric Analysis (2015–2026)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.38073/jpi.5930Keywords:
Literacy Among Youth, Religious Literacy, Islamic Literacy, Qur’anic Literacy, Bibliometric AnalysisAbstract
Literacy among youth has become a prominent and rapidly expanding research field, yet it remains unclear to what extent this scholarship engages religious, Islamic, and Qur’anic literacy and how these strands relate to the field’s dominant themes. This study maps the intellectual structure and development of research on literacy among youth and examines the position of religious, Islamic, and Qur’anic literacy within it. A bibliometric analysis was conducted on 4,193 Scopus-indexed journal articles published between 2015 and 2026, combining performance analysis with author-keyword co-occurrence and temporal-overlay mapping using VOSviewer. Annual scholarly output grew by approximately 9.5% per year and peaked at 708 articles in 2025. The field was dominated by institutions in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom and concentrated in adolescent-, health-, and media- or digital-literacy research. Four thematic clusters emerged, with media and civic literacies representing important areas of recent development. A targeted sub-analysis identified only 49 articles, representing 1.17% of the total corpus, that substantively addressed religious or Islam-related literacy. Importantly, no article in the validated subset explicitly examined Qur’anic literacy as a substantive literacy construct. These findings indicate that religion-related literacy remains marginal within the broader international youth-literacy research landscape and reveal a significant conceptual and empirical gap concerning Qur’anic literacy. The study provides an evidence-based agenda for researchers in Islamic studies and Islamic education seeking to clarify and consolidate these emerging areas of inquiry.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Sri Hartati Saleh, Seipah Kardipah, Aidil Aidil, Muhammad Iqbal Rahman, Nuraini Nuraini
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