Understanding Global Trends and Key Influences in Sufi Studies: A Comprehensive Analysis

This article presents a bibliometric analysis of the field of Sufi Studies to reveal its intellectual structure and trends worldwide. In recent years, Sufism has become a focus of academic research and has been studied in many disciplines. The paper analyses the general status and intellectual structure of Sufi articles published in the WoS database between 1976 and 2024. Performance analysis and scientific mapping techniques were used to identify the most influential countries, journals, authors and publications. Analyses included co-occurrence and co-citation analyses to create a conceptual and intellectual portrait of Sufi literature. The results show that the United States and the United Kingdom are the countries with the highest number of publications and citations. The most influential authors include William C. Chittick, Annemarie Schimmel and Carl W. Ernst. The richness and diversity of Sufi literature is enriched by approaches from different disciplines. However, bibliometric analysis has limitations due to some data sources and language issues. For future research, it is suggested to use different databases, to include multilingual studies and to analyse different types of publications. Researchers can further enrich the Sufi literature by exploring the relationship of Sufism to psychology, art and other disciplines and by conducting studies that seek answers to current problems.