Mapping and extending research on women’s entrepreneurship in Islamic contexts: insights from a bibliometric review

This paper addresses two interrelated questions: How has research on women’s entrepreneurship in Islamic contexts evolved? and, What directions can advance future theoretical and empirical work? To address the first query, I conducted bibliometric and thematic analyses of 97 scholarly articles published between 1980 and 2023, mapping publication trends, geographic patterns, and dominant themes. My analysis indicates that existing scholarship is both geographically concentrated and conceptually uneven. Specifically, much of the literature focuses on a limited number of Muslim-majority countries and often emphasizes the enabling role of Islamic values in women’s entrepreneurship, with less attention paid to the ways in which religion also operates through institutional and sociocultural constraints. The variation across Islamic contexts and the interaction between formal and informal institutions also remain insufficiently examined. I thus propose three directions for future research: (1) examining heterogeneity across Islamic contexts, (2) investigating the gap between formal and informal institutions, and (3) adopting a more balanced understanding of Islam’s enabling and constraining roles. Pursuing these directions will result in a more context-sensitive, comprehensive, and theoretically grounded approach to studying women’s entrepreneurship in Islamic contexts.