Quarterly Journal of Political
Research in Islamic World

Due to the importance of Islamic world from many perspectives, it has attracted the attention of many researchers to itself, and as a result, scientific outputs on Islam topic has increased considerably. On the other hand, nowadays, scientometric studies have been used as indicators for evaluating and assessing the researches as well as for policy making for future studies. Policy making in science and technology is inevitable and in every research area there must be clear policies and strategies. But in Islamic studies area, despite of extension and importance these studies, there is a gap in assessing of its research outcomes. The necessity of such assessment becomes more clear when we find that Islamic countries need to organize their researches and avoid disordered researches so that they could optimize future researches through policy making. Hence, with the aim of setting goals for future studies, present study by using sicentometrics indicators intends to help policy making in political studies of Islamic world. The main aim of this research is to analyze the conceptual structure of scientific outputs of west researchers in political on Islamic topics.

From quantitative view, the number of researches have been increased rapidly since 2005 and forecasts show that until 2016, the number of researches on Islam topic would go beyond 1600 papers per year. Governments’ policies like Islamophobia and secular Islam have affected the researches clearly. Also, many of the present social problems, like muslims’ problems in France has been reflected in some of researches. Moreover,it can be said issues like democracy, human rights, terrorism, violence, and Islamic governance are the other important topics of researches.