Examining Islamic perspectives in articles in health sciences: a work in progress involving Scopus

Abstract

Islamic perspectives can be effectively imbued in published articles to inform, modify or change beliefs, practice and values among the professionals. This study serves to examine the integration of Islamic perspectives in these articles, originating from Malaysia, indexed in SCOPUS under Health Sciences category. The SCOPUS database was used to generate the data. Using the Boolean operator “OR”,eleven (11) keywords, namely Islam, Islamic, "Islamic Worldview", "Islamic perspective", Muslim, Quran, Quranic, Hadith, Tauhid, Tawhid and Tawhidic were typed into the search tab. Those keywords were to appear either in the title or abstract or keywords of the article. Subsequently, only articles from Malaysia were selected for the study. Work is in progress to examine the identified articles to facilitate for further discussions related to the Islamic perspectives that they addressed. To date, ninety (90) articles from Malaysia were identified by Scopus. The keywords “Muslim” and “Islam” seem to be prominently used in these articles. The various themes of those studies are also analyzed to identify the different areas where Islamic perspectives can be further enhanced. The importance of Islamic terminologies in the title, abstract or keywords to generate interest towards the religion cannot be neglected. The use of Muslims as subjects of the studies, as well as Islamic countries, communities and institutions being mere sites of data collection, can give rise to a distorted perspective of what Muslims and Islam really present. Muslim professionals need to plan and initiate avenues to overcome that possibility. A careful examination of research areas could provide valuable directions in identifying the appropriate Islamic perspectives in the teaching and learning activities