Conceptual and influential structure of Takaful literature: a bibliometric review

Purpose - The purpose of this research is to provide a comprehensive review of key influential aspects and conceptual structure of Takaful literature. Design/methodology/approach - The authors review 149 journal articles using bibliometric citation analysis, co-word analysis and citation histograms. However, the authors have introduced a new index of keywords for co-word analysis. Findings - The results purpose four research clusters of Takaful literature. The first theme compared Takaful with conventional insurance from various perspectives. Second theme explored the business model and sharia-compliant issues. Third theme applied the marketing concepts and examined the customer behaviour such as commitment, loyalty, satisfaction or awareness. Fourth theme examined risk management, investment and corporate governance issues. This research also identified the structure of variables studied in each theme. Originality/value - This paper follows a very novel and trending bibliometric approach and explores what has been published, encompassing all aspects of Takaful literature. This study also presents 22 future research directions which are either missing or less researched in Takaful literature.