Purpose Islamic Insurance (Takaful) played a dynamic role in Islamic Social Finance (ISF). The popularity of the Takaful concept is being increased with each passing day. To describe the process, it is important to understand past areas of research, research differences, areas of unknown Takaful research, as well as the existing data. However, the purpose of the paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the development of qualitative research by carefully examining the nature of science and aspects of social relations in ISF. Design/methodology/approach Field, concerns with analysing and measuring the scholarly literature, quantitative characteristics of sciences and scientific technologies are known as scient metrics. This research includes queries such as “Islamic Insurance”, “Takaful” and “Shariah Insurance” as a reference in “Article title, Abstract and Keywords” based on Scopus from 2002 to 2022. This analysis was conducted in February 2022. The Bibliometrics, R-Studio, VOSviewer and Excel software are used to analyse the collected data and apply the bibliometric analysis. Findings The gist of the results and findings is that there are clear research gaps in the existing literature on Takaful. The available research on this subject does cover historical background, concept and models of Takaful and customer satisfaction towards Takaful model. Very important areas such as use of technology for bringing innovation in Takaful products and Shariah issues in existing practice and their solutions were not found in the present literature on Takaful. Originality/value This is the comprehensive research article to examine current literature on Takaful with bibliometric analysis. Results and potential areas of this research could be much helpful for scholars and researchers to create more dynamic improvements in the scientific development of Takaful in ISF.

The main purpose of this study is to encapsulate the major themes and their inter-linkage within Islamic microfinance research and to highlight the important gaps by recommending future research areas of worth investigation. The Scopus database is used for this bibliometric analysis. Using a robust selection criterion, 89 research articles were finalized to conduct the analysis. For the visualization and presentation of results, various software were used, such as R, RStudio, VOSviewer, and Microsoft excel. Results of content analysis and literature mapping show that most of the available studies on Islamic microfinance are theoretical and cover the topics of Islamic microfinance models, importance as a tool for poverty alleviation, and integration of Islamic commercial and social finance. There is an ample research gap in this area, and there are various avenues that could be explored in future research. In comparison with other studies on the same area using the same methodology, this study presents the various research agendas, areas and ideas for future research, which makes this study a good contribution to the literature.