Bibliometric Analysis of Research on Pilgrimage and Religious Tourism in Iran

چکیده

Using bibliometric techniques, this study maps three decades of scholarship on pilgrimage and religious tourism in Iran. A systematic search of the Noormags, ISC, and GANJ databases yielded 696 scholarly outputs—454 journal articles and 242 theses—which were screened through explicit inclusion / exclusion criteria and analyzed quantitatively. Results reveal an exponential rise in publications from the mid-2000s, with pronounced surges in 2012 and 2015 that coincide with national pilgrimage-development programs and the launch of academic degrees in religious tourism. Bradford’s analysis identified ten core journals—led by Miqat-e Hajj, Farhang-e Razavi, and Hajj and Ziarah Research Journal—that together account for nearly one-quarter of all articles. Among 817 contributing authors, only seven have published more than five papers, reflecting a highly fragmented author landscape dominated by geography and sociology scholars. Co-authorship networks are weak and largely confined to supervisor–student collaborations. Geographically, Tehran Province (38 %) and Khorasan-e Razavi (24 %) are the principal knowledge hubs, underscoring the research pull of major pilgrimage cities and flagship universities. Disciplinary profiling shows that over 90 % of studies cluster in five fields—geographical sciences, management, Islamic theology, social sciences, and communication studies. Despite this concentration, the absence of a comprehensive scientific map and the scarcity of inter-institutional partnerships highlight the need for integrated citation databases and stronger collaborative frameworks to advance interdisciplinary research on pilgrimage in Iran.