The intellectual structure of halal research based on Islamic epistemology and bibliometrics

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation aimed to achieve three main objectives; defining Halal Research Comprehensive Index based on bibliometric study, constructing collection of halal food related Quranic commandments, and conducting a bibliometric study of halal food themes from online databases. This research is essentially, a descriptive study that emphasized subject epistemological origin in which definitions of halal from the Islamic knowledge were explored and exploited in the document retrieval process. In the subject analysis, a combination of reviews and bibliometric analysis was applied to explore the meaning and to extract research data. The mapping review defined halal concept epistemologically, in which translations of Quran verses were chosen to trace the origin of halal research according to the Islamic primary source of revealed knowledge. Concept definitions from halal governing bodies were also compared to gain insights into the governance of halal verifications and endorsements at the International level. The systematic literature review focused on the original concept, ‘halalan toyyiban’ where research papers from Scopus were extracted and analysed systematically. State-of-the-Art review collected the latest research works in halal and analysed the latest research themes. Al-Qaradawi (2001), ‘The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam’ was the main source of reference in the thematic citation analysis that corresponded to Al-Qaradawi’s categorization of halal with research data from Scopus. Citation network analysis on findings from Al-Qaradawi revealed halal business and halal social as the top themes. Data collections are from EBSCohost (1,400 documents), Emerald (307 documents), IEEE Xplore (48 documents), ProQuest (1,155 documents), and ScienceDirect (125 document), Scopus (1,492 documents), and Web of Science (1,217 documents) totalling 5,744 documents. All data are extracted between December 2018 to June 2019. Co-word or co-occurrence of terms from all collected data are identified and clustered. The research output is the Halal Research Comprehensive Index that was collectively a list of high impact halal research publications from the research analysis. This research utilizes several instruments namely, VOSviewer, GEPHI, and Microsoft Excel in data analysis. The research findings were mainly reviews and bibliometric analysis. Mapping review of halal definitions revealed similar descriptions of halal concept, conceptually and operationally. Systematic literature review identified ‘halal business’ and ‘halal social’ as the top two halal research topic in Scopus. Halal supply chain research topics were the main findings in the state-of-the-art review. The thesis output is the Halal Research Comprehensive Index to high impact halal research topics. Five major themes were identified in the co-word analysis; halal industry, halal forensics, halal slaughter, animal and meat sciences, halal consumerism and marketing, and halal gelatine.