Educational technology in islamic education: a bibliometric analysis of research trends, gaps, and emerging themes

Abstract

The integration of digital technology into Islamic education has accelerated markedly over the past decade, yet the scholarly literature that documents this transformation remains scattered across disciplines, outlets, and national contexts, making it difficult to see the field as a whole. This study maps the intellectual structure of research on educational technology in Islamic education and identifies the gaps and emerging themes that can guide future scholarship. A bibliometric analysis was conducted on 41 Scopus-indexed documents retrieved with the search string "Islamic education" AND ("educational technology" OR "digital learning" OR "digital education") applied to article titles, abstracts, and keywords. Publication trends, author productivity, citation impact, source distribution, geographic concentration, and keyword co-occurrence were examined, with VOSviewer used to visualise the keyword network, keyword density, temporal overlay, and co-authorship structure. The corpus is small but expanding rapidly: thirty of the forty-one documents appeared between 2024 and 2026. Research is concentrated in Indonesia and Malaysia, dispersed across many outlets, and produced largely by small, weakly connected author groups. Thematically, the field is organised around a dense core of Islamic education, digital learning, digital literacy, and educational technology, with adoption- and acceptance-oriented studies dominating, while values, ethics, immersive technologies, and artificial intelligence sit at the periphery in the newest and least-cited work. These patterns point to an emerging rather than an unpopular niche, and to a persistent gap between technological adoption and its integration with Islamic pedagogy, values, and ethics. The study contributes a focused, evidence-based map of the field and a four-dimensional framework technology, pedagogy, values and ethics, and educational outcomes for organising future research. The findings reflect the 41 documents analysed and should not be read as the totality of global research on the topic.