A survey of Islamic finance research – influences and influencers

Islamic finance research has proliferated in the past five years. Between 1982 and 2020, a total of 315 research articles have been published in high quality journals. This paper undertakes a survey of this literature since 2005 and investigates the contributions of authors, institutions, and countries to the Islamic finance literature. Our analysis leads to ranking the impact of the authors and institutions based on paper downloads and citations. Our focus is 242 papers published since 2015 contributed by 406 authors associated with 280 institutions from 57 countries. Our analysis reveals that the ranking of authors, institutions and countries is neither constrained by religious beliefs or geography (location in Muslim-majority countries) nor dependent on such characteristics of academic institutions. This implies that Islamic finance has a global academic appeal.