The Scientific, Intellectual, Conceptual, and Collaborative Landscape of Digital Hajj Management Research: A Bibliometric Mapping Review

Abstract

Understanding digital Hajj management is important for the future development of Hajj administration and to improve the services provided to the pilgrims throughout their spiritual journey. This paper presented a comprehensive bibliometric mapping review with BiblioSpy® to analyse the distribution of document types, trends in citations, global patterns of publication and networks of keyword co-occurrence. The analysis indicates that Saudi Arabia is the most active jurisdiction in terms of research output followed by Malaysia, India and the United States. The majority of the highly cited papers are focused on key issues related to Hajj, such as crowd management through mobile and wireless technologies, emergency preparedness during mass gatherings and the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) for Hajj and Umrah services. The keyword co-occurrence networks reveal the main clusters, including the use of technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and RFID; sophisticated technical solutions for crowd management using AI, machine learning, and computer vision; and contextual themes such as mass gatherings, COVID-19,and healthcare. The study concludes by highlighting the fact that the intellectual structure of digital Hajj management research is highly skewed towards crowd and emergency technological solutions. The study suggests that these findings can be used in future research to explore underdeveloped themes and integrate advanced technologies more deeply for a resilient Hajj administration.