Avicenna (d. 428/1037) occupies an exceptional and enduring position in the history of Islamic philosophy owing to the scope, depth, and interdisciplinary character of his works, as well as to his profound influence on subsequent intellectual developments. In the modern period, the vitality and continuing relevance of Avicenna’s thought are clear in the sustained and growing academic interest devoted to his works. This interest extends beyond the critical editing and translation of classical texts to newly established connections with contemporary discussions in philosophy, the history of science, and ethics. The increasing number of publications devoted to Avicenna raises important questions concerning the ways in which his thought is interpreted and reassessed in contemporary scholarship. In response to this ongoing academic engagement, the present study aims to examine systematically research on Avicenna within the broader framework of the history of Islamic philosophy by employing a bibliometric analysis. Scientific articles published under relevant titles in major national and international databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, and TR Index were systematically analyzed by considering all diacritical and non-diacritical spelling variants of the names “Ibn Sina,” “Ibn Sīnā,” “Ibn Sînâ,” and “Avicenna.” Within this scope, a total of 1.512 research articles indexed in WoS, Scopus, and TR Index were included in the analysis. By examining metadata drawn from titles, keywords, and abstracts, the study seeks to identify the conceptual structures, thematic orientations, and interdisciplinary connections that characterize modern research on Avicenna. The bibliometric analysis was conducted using the software tools VOSviewer and EkşiVeri, which enable the visualization of citation networks, co-authorship patterns, and thematic clusters. The fact that Ibn Sīnā is the most frequently published topic in the WoS, Scopus, and TR Index databases, together with his profound and lasting influence on subsequent periods, was a decisive factor in selecting Ibn Sīnā as the focus of this study. This focus also allows for broader assessments of research trends in Islamic philosophy. The methodological framework adopted in this study facilitates the identification of major research trends, areas of concentrated scholarly interest, and dominant methodological approaches. The WoS and Scopus databases provide a more comprehensive overview of research on Islamic philosophy and Ibn Sīnā due to their international scope and the longer time span covered by their datasets. By contrast, although TR Index is a relatively recent database, it has been found to possess significant potential in the field by indexing productive journals, yticularly those focusing on the theme of Ibn Sīnā. An examination of author productivity and impact across the WoS, Scopus, and TR Index databases reveals a noteworthy pattern in Islamic philosophy research. The prominent ranking of Turkish scholars in both national and international indices indicates their increasing academic visibility within the field of Islamic philosophy. The validity of Lotka’s law across all three indices further demonstrates that many contributors are represented by single publications. This finding suggests that, despite Ibn Sīnā’s central position and frequent appearance in the literature, in-depth and sustained thematic studies devoted to his thought remain relatively limited. Keyword analyses indicate that studies on Ibn Sīnā are predominantly concentrated around concepts related to metaphysics and logic. In this respect, TR Index presents a distinctive profile when compared to the other indices. While research indexed in WoS and Scopus tends to situate Ibn Sīnā within an intellectual framework largely limited to figures such as Aristotle, Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, al-Ghazālī, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Ibn Rushd, Maimonides, Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, and Mullā Ṣadrā, the TR Index database also foregrounds figures such as al-Kindī, al-Fārābī, al-Shahrastānī, and Suhrawardī. This suggests the presence, within TR Index, of a more diversified body of literature that also engages with post-Avicennan philosophical traditions. From the perspective of conceptual distribution, common themes such as being, causality, epistemology, creation, emanation, quiddity, substance, and truth predominate across all three databases. Furthermore, the frequency distribution of keywords is largely consistent with Zipf’s law, in that a limited number of concepts recur with high frequency, while the remaining terms appear only sporadically. Overall, the findings demonstrate both the continuity of Avicenna’s philosophical legacy and the evolving patterns of its interpretation in contemporary scholarship.
İrfan Karadeniz (Tue,) studied this question.