Exploring Trends and Themes of Hadith Authentication Research: a Bibliometric Analysis and Future Agenda

This bibliometric study maps the intellectual structure and thematic evolution of hadith authentication research at the intersection of classical Islamic scholarship and computational methodologies. Analysing 222 Scopus-indexed publications (1994–2025) using Biblioshiny and VOSviewer, author keywords were standardised to examine co-occurrence patterns and conceptual structures. The findings indicate sustained growth in scholarly output after 2018 and identify four dominant thematic clusters, namely AI -enhanced authentication, isnād and matn criticism, jurisprudential integration and ontology-based knowledge modelling. A clear shift towards data-driven approaches including BERT -based language models is observed. However, structural imbalances persist, particularly the dominance of isnād -focused studies over matn analysis and the limited availability of benchmark datasets. These results highlight the need for an integrated digital framework that computationally encodes classical isnād and matn principles within uṣūl al-ḥadīth . The study proposes a hybrid verification paradigm to guide future interdisciplinary research.