Zakat worldwide: A 50-year bibliometric analysis and research agenda

Zakat has increasingly been recognized as a key instrument of Islamic social finance for poverty alleviation and socioeconomic development. Over the past decades, scholarly interest in zakat has expanded considerably across multiple disciplines. However, the existing literature remains fragmented, with limited comprehensive mapping of its intellectual development, thematic structure, and emerging research directions. Addressing this gap, this study aims to systematically analyze global zakat research over the past fifty years to identify publication trends, key contributors, dominant research themes, and future research opportunities. This study employs a bibliometric analysis using 1,129 journal articles indexed in the Scopus database between 1975 and 2025. Data were analyzed using Scopus analytical tools, Harzing’s Publish or Perish, and VOSviewer to examine publication patterns, citation performance, influential authors and institutions, and keyword co-occurrence networks. The analysis follows a four-stage bibliometric framework involving research objective formulation, systematic data collection, bibliometric analysis and visualization, and interpretation of results. The findings reveal a significant increase in zakat-related publications, particularly after 2019, indicating growing global interest in the field. Malaysia and Indonesia dominate scholarly contributions, accounting for nearly four-fifths of total publications. Thematic analysis identifies six major research clusters, including Islamic social finance, governance and institutional performance, zakat management and distribution, charity and corporate responsibility, socioeconomic development, and demographic perspectives. The results also highlight several research gaps, particularly limited geographical coverage beyond Southeast Asia, insufficient examination of asnaf behavioral dynamics, gaps in zakat compliance research, limited focus on administrative competency, and the absence of environmental sustainability perspectives in zakat studies. Theoretically, this study contributes by providing an updated and comprehensive mapping of the intellectual landscape of zakat research and identifying emerging themes that extend the conceptual discourse of Islamic social finance. Practically, the findings offer valuable insights for policymakers and zakat institutions in improving governance, enhancing collection efficiency, strengthening institutional capacity, and designing programs that support sustainable poverty alleviation. The originality of this study lies in presenting the most up-to-date bibliometric mapping of global zakat scholarship covering developments up to 2025 and proposing a structured research agenda to advance future studies in the field.