Analysis of the Knowledge of Mahdism in Iran With the Approach of Scientometrics and Information Clustering: A Case Study; Articles

Objective: Scientific productions in the field of Mahdism have grown in the last two decades and due to its religious and political dimension in the region, conceptual challenges have been registered. As a result, knowing the contexts, priorities and analysis the knowledge of the domain seems necessary. The purpose of this study is to investigate the knowledge structure in Mahdism research using co-word analysis.
Methods: This research is practical in terms of purpose. In order to analyze the concept of knowledge in the field of Mahdism research, a combination of scientometric methods, information clustering and network analysis have been used. The research tools include scientometric software such as: "Ravar_matrix, Ucinet, NetDraw, Vosviewer”. The research community includes all the articles in the field of Mahdism in domestic magazines from the databases of " Noormags, Magiran, SID" from the beginning to October 2023.
Results: The findings indicate that in the last two decades, there has been a significant growth in the researches of Mahdism. Also, many authors from the Alimah Hoza and University have contributed to its scientific productions. in this research, it was found that the authors follow the model of an authorship. Collaboration in the form of co-authorship is less involved. Descriptive findings about the journals of this field showed that 5 journals are considered core journals in this field. The findings show the field of Mahdavi studies in other fields of studies such as: social sciences, sociology, historical and political sciences, education and philosophy, art and literature interdisciplinary relations. The results of co-word analysis showed that more than 1341 concepts or keywords were mentioned and the concepts of " The Holy Mehdi, the waiting, appearance, doctrines of Mahdism, Extremist, false claimants" had the highest frequency among all concepts.Also, the conceptual pairs " the waiting - The Holy Mehdi, Islamic revolution-the waiting, The Holy Mehdi - last days, future study- Mahdism research, doctrine of Mahdoit- appearance " had the most co-occurrences. In addition, the concepts of "false claimants, Salafism, globalization, denial of Mahdism", social standards and culture of Mahdism were identified as emerging concepts in the research. The results related to clustering showed that the knowledge of this field in Iran consists of 21 main clusters. The first to third clusters include "the influence of the Islamic Revolution on Mahdism, traditions and hadiths of Mahdism, social challenges of Mahdism" respectively, have the most concepts. The analysis of the maps indicates that the concepts of this field have many conceptual relationships with each other, and the concentration percentage of the network is 0.5, which is average in terms of density.
Conclusion: Undoubtedly, the field of Mahdism is one of the most important topics in Shiism. The results of this research provided a big picture of the issues raised in the researches of this field. It also clarified the fields of future research.