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“Bread or Freedom”: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and the Arabic Literary Journal Ḥiwār (1962-67)

Geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, how adab became literary: formalism, orientalism and the institutions of world literature, towards a critical theory of al-nahḍah : epistemology, ideology and capital, an introduction to the history of modern arabic literature in egypt, biographical note, journal menu, submit article, editorial board, indexing and abstracting, subject list.

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Palestine as Theory Special Issue: Editors’ Note

After nostalgia: revisiting palestine’s poetics of al-andalus, prolegomenon for a theory of the palestinian american novel, palestine, futurity, and the rithāʾ : a poetics of speculation and proleptic mourning, dying for palestine: metonymy, metaphor, and/or solidarity, factoring asymmetry into the equation: on juxtaposing palestinian and israeli literatures, what is nakbah literature selections from al-ufuq al-jadīd magazine (1965), selection from resistance literature in occupied palestine, 1948–1966 by ghassān kanafānī, the worlding of arabic literature: language, affect, and the ethics of translatability , written by anna ziajka stanton, leaks, hacks, and scandals: arab culture in the digital age , written by tarek el-ariss, melancholy acts: defeat and cultural critique in the arab world , written by nouri gana, war remains: ruination and resistance in lebanon , written by yasmine khayyat.

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International Journal for Arabic Linguistics and Literature Studies  (JALLS)   is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal, published Quarterly by  Refaad . The Journal focuses on being a field for the dissemination of original and innovative research on the topics of the Arabic language and its various sciences in order to contribute to the deepening of specialized knowledge in the affairs of the Arabic language. Also, it is specialized in the related areas of critical thinking examining the multiple linguistic levels and literature and critical phenomena in the Arab heritage. Moreover, it is concerned with the latest studies of these Phenomena in the modern era, according to the mechanisms of serious scientific research.

Verbal Connections in the Nominal Sentence and their Effect in Directing the Connotations of Meaning in Al-Buhturi’s Descriptive Poetry

Objectives: This study deals with the verbal connections in the nominal sentence in Al-Buhturi's descriptive poetry as to studying, analyzing them, exploring their semantic and aesthetic impact. This came through presenting the areas of verbal connections for the nominal sentence in poems dedicated to ...

The Impact of the Doctrinal and Jurisprudential Meaning According to Al-Fakhr Al-Razi in Determining the Meanings of the Letters of Meanings

Objectives: The study seeks to achieve the following objectives. First: Identifying specific models related to the phenomenon of alternating letters of meaning according to Imam Al-Fakhr Al-Razi. Second: Identifying the impact of the doctrinal meaning and the definitive jurisprudential rulings in controlling ...

The Auxiliary Verb in Contemporary Jordanian Arabic: A Historical Descriptive Study

Objectives: The present study proceeds from the idea that many of the contemporary Arabic phenomena that modern linguists experience are linguistic phenomena that existed in classical Arabic or ancient Semitic languages. This study, therefore, has argued that the hypothesis stating Arabic is different ...

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Lara HARB, Arabic Poetics. Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature

Myrne, pernilla. female sexuality in the early medieval islamic world: gender and sex in arabic literature. i. b. taurus, 2019, foreign language anxiety: translating and validating a scale.

The purpose of this study was to validate one of the most frequently used tools for assessing anxiety associated with foreign languages. The researcher translated it into Arabic because there was no Arabic literature on such an instrument. To achieve the goal, a committee approach was followed (Brislin, 1980) to ensure the validity of the translation. A sample of 102 students was purposefully selected from International Islamic University Malaysia. The instrument consists of 33 items to measure communication apprehension, test anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was run to validate the instrument; initially, the PCA produced ten-factor solutions, accounting for 71% of the total variance explained. However, the last nine factors had only two or three loadings each, and they had cross-loading as well. Therefore, only one factor was used in the final, which accounted for 51% of the total variance. The researcher took this factor due to its importance for the Arabic literature, which is also in need of a valid instrument to measure communication apprehension. Due to the lack of convergent validity in the other items, the researcher suggests validating the original instrument.

THE INFLUENCE OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY ON ISLAMIC CULTURE AL-TAWHIDI IS A MODEL

The East, with its ontological history, is full of religions, and the spirituality of the eastern mind is evident in its love for the literature of proverbs and wisdom that it was able to formulate, and its sanctification of the word is only due to its magical impact on himself; It is his consolation for his painful reality! It deals with its concepts and religious and worldly matters, and that he did not digest Greek philosophy until after the writers presented it with short sentences with wise meanings from the sayings of its philosophers! It is known that wisdom and proverbs are advice, guidance, advice and exhortation, expressing a subjective experience, length of contemplation and insight into life matters, and they often have moral dimensions and that they are suitable for all human societies in a time and place. The concept of culture is so complex that it includes all human aspects. Speaking about the impact of Greek culture on Arab culture or even the presence of multiple connections, it stems from the phenomenon of influence and influence. Greek philosophy was mixed with Islamic thought and culture in the Abbasid era in general, and Arabic literature in general. In particular, it became one of the tools of expression, and the Greek philosophical culture penetrated into the Arab culture (its terms, concepts and sayings of its philosophers) until it spread in its three types: pure philosophical culture, literary philosophy, and philosophical literature. Islamic Society As the names of Greek philosophers gained popularity among members of society in all its classes! The research focused on the issue of the impact of Muslim writers on the dissemination of Greek philosophical culture in the Abbasid era, taking from Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi (d. 414 AH / 1023 AD) as a model; Although al-Tawhidi was not unique in mixing literature with philosophy; But it is a typical example of the writers of the Abbasid era who were influenced by Greek philosophy and whose literary culture was mixed with Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy has spread among members of the Islamic community by publishing the wisdom, proverbs and sayings of Greek philosophers and scientists. The research was divided into three sections that dealt with the first topic: the relationship between literature and philosophy, while the second topic: the reasons for monotheistic influence on Greek philosophy, and the third topic: it follows the impact of Greek philosophy with the works of monotheism.

Autofiction as a Lens for Reading Contemporary Egyptian Writing

AbstractThis chapter offers a discussion of three texts by bicultural Egyptian writers: Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club (1964), Radwa Ashour’s Specters (1999), and Miral al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights (2010). The three works are read via an autofictional lens, with focus on Ghali’s autofictional identity, Ashour’s autofictional threads, and al-Tahawy’s autofictionalizing experience. The study suggests that autofictionality can be identified in the texts in terms of genre as well as technique, demonstrating the potential of the autofictional as a literary strategy in negotiating identity, memory, and experience in the writing of Egyptian literature. Our reading of the three texts testifies to the affordance of an autofictional lens in reading Arabic literature and allows new insights into writing at the intersection of reality and the imagination.

Ibn Qutaybah, The Excellence of the Arabs, eds. James E. Montgomery and Peter Webb, trans. Sarah Bowen Savant and Peter Webb. (Library of Arabic Literature.) New York: New York University Press, 2017. Pp. xxxiii, 304. $40. ISBN: 978-1-4798-0957-8.

A review of kahlil gibran’s major creative works (ulasan hasil karya kreatif utama kahlil gibran).

Kahlil Gibran is one of the most important writers of modern Arabic literature and one of the most successful poets of English in the twentieth century. He is undoubtedly a pioneer among Arab poets and novelists writing in English and the most important figure in the Émigré literary movement. His world-wide popularity is due in large part to his universal spiritual message of love and compassion. This study, focusing on both his Arabic and English works, seeks to explore the various contextual aspects that affect all of Gibran’s works since his birth in Mount Lebanon.  It also presents a critical overview of all his works for readers and critics that seek a deeper appreciation and a more comprehensive understanding of this literary genius. The study highlights the spiritual element which serves as the link that unifies his Arabic and English works and propels them to enduring literary and popular success across cultures. Keywords: Kahlil Gibran, Āmigré Literature, Diaspora Writers, Spirituality, Perennialism.            Abstrak Kahlil Gibran merupakan salah seorang penulis yang tersohor dalam kesusasteraan Arab moden dan salah seorang penyair Inggeris yang berjaya pada abad kedua puluh. Kredibiliti beliau tidak diragukan kerana beliau merupakan perintis dalam kalangan penyair dan novelis Arab yang menulis dalam bahasa Inggeris dan tokoh terpenting dalam gerakan sastera Émigré. Sebahagian besar popularitinya di seluruh dunia adalah disebabkan oleh mesej rohani universal cinta dan belas kasihannya. Kajian ini difokuskan kepada kedua-dua karya Arab dan Inggerisnya untuk meneroka pelbagai aspek kontekstual yang mempengaruhi semua karya Gibran sejak kelahirannya di Gunung Lubnan. Kajian ini juga memberikan gambaran keseluruhan yang kritis mengenai semua karya beliau kepada pembaca dan pengkritik yang mencari penghayatan yang lebih mendalam dan pemahaman yang lebih komprehensif tentang kehebatan sastera ini. Kajian ini juga mengenengahkan unsur kerohanian yang berfungsi sebagai penghubung yang menyatukan hasil karya Arab dan Inggerisnya dan mendorong mereka kepada kejayaan sastera dan popular yang berkekalan di seluruh budaya. Kata Kunci: Kahlil Gibran, Sastera Āmigré, Penulis Diaspora, Kerohanian, Perenialisme.

المناجاة في الأدب العربي النيجيري:دراسة أسلوبية لمناجاة زكريا إدريس أوبو حسين MUNAJAT IN NIGERIAN ARABIC LITERATURE: A STYLISTIC STUDY OF MUNAJAT OF ZAKARIYAU IDREES -- OBOH OSENI

الملخصهذا البحث يرصد دراسة مناجيات البروفيسور زكريا إدريس أوبو حسين، دراسة أسلوبية، للوقوف على قدرة الكاتب في رسم المشاهد المختلفة في حالات النفس الإنسانية، والكشف عن مستويات المناجيات النصية، والتقديم لدلالات ما خلف النص بوصفه نصاً أدبياً خاضعاً للقراءة والتأويل. وقد تناولت الدراسة كتب مناجاته في مستوياتها الصوتية والتركيبية والدلالية محاولة لإجراء الدراسة الأسلوبية عند كل مستوى، فقد أورد البروفيسور الاستعارات والتشبيهات والكنايات بشكل تفاعلي مع الجو الملائم لكل مناجاة، وأهمية هذا البحث تظهر في قلة أمثاله في المكتبات التي تستقري مثل هذه النصوص الإسلامية الشريفة، والتي تستحق لفت النظر. وتم تقسيم الدراسة إلى أربعة مباحث، سبقهم ملخص، ومقدمة، وفي الخاتمة تم تسجيل أهم النتائج فضلا عن المصادر والمراجع، والله المستعان. AbstractProfessor Zakariyau Idrees Oboh Oseni, is one of the prominent figures of Arabic and Islamic literature in Nigeria, working with University of Ilorin in Nigeria as an exemplary teacher, a writer and even a Critical critic. His poetic talent, literary ability, linguistic wealth, knowledge of the Noble Qur’an and the Prophet’s Sunnah, made him succeed in the Art of Munajat, and succeed as a sincere scholar who raises the nation a high-level education. This Research aims to study the Munajat (Monologues) of Professor Zakariyau Idrees Oboh Oseni as a stylistic study, to determine the writer›s ability to draw different scenes in cases of the human soul, to reveal the levels of textual Monologues, and to present the implications of what is behind the text as a literary text subject to reading and interpretation. The Study dealt with his Monologue books in their phonetic, structural and semantic levels, an attempt to conduct a stylistic study at each level. This approach includes a set of principles and procedures that aid the study of the text as a scientific study, through method analysis. The research is divided into three sections, preceded by a summary, followed by a conclusion.

THE EFFECT OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHICAL REALISM (AL-MAŻHAB AL-WĀQI’Ī) TOWARD MODERN ARABIC LITERATURE / PENGARUH ALIRAN REALISME (AL-MAŻHAB AL-WĀQI’Ī) BARAT TERHADAP SASTRA ARAB MODERN

This study aims to find out the intricacies of philosophical realism (al-Mażhab al-Wāqi’ī) and its influence on modern Arabic literature. It is undeniable that literary genre that grew up in the west have had a great influence on the development of literature in the world, including Arabic. This research was a literature review that used a qualitative descriptive method by examining and reviewing several related literature. The result showed that realism emerged as a response to the romanticism philosophy which tends to the subjectivity of writers and the depiction of objects that are full of imagination. Furthermore, the western realism has also influenced modern Arabic literature, both poetry and prose. Realism made Arabic poets aware that love poems were no longer relevant to the reality of the people who were in the midst of crisis due to colonialism. Writers began to invigorate the principles of statehood, nationality, and humanity. However, the adoption of western realism, in some aspects, is contrary to Islamic values. This philosophy directs literature towards materialism, atheism, fulfillment of physical needs, and so on.

'What Has Been Written Upon the Forehead, the Eye Must See': An Arabic-Jewish Author Between Baghdad and an Israeli Transit Camp

As an integral part of Arab society since the pre-Islamic period, Jews participated in the making of Arabic literature. We know of prominent Jewish poets such as al-Samawʾal ibn ʿᾹdiyāʾ in the sixth century A.D. and Ibrāhīm ibn Sahl in al-Andalus in the thirteenth century. During the first half of the twentieth century, Arabic literature in fuṣḥā (standard Arabic) written by Jews witnessed a great revival, especially in Iraq and Egypt, but this revival was cut short as a casualty of Zionism and Arab nationalism and the conflict between them. We are currently witnessing the demise of Arabic literature written by Jews; the Arabic language among Jews will probably remain mostly a tool of the military establishment and the intelligence systems as encapsulated in the dictum 'know your enemy' instead of being a medium for coexistence and knowing the Other. The article concentrates on the literary activities of one of the most talented Iraqi-Jewish authors, Shalom Darwīsh (1913-1997), whose promising anticipated literary future in Arabic literature encountered a deadlock following the aforementioned exclusion of Jews from 'Arabness'.

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Author Search Find which Gale literature series include entries on an author. Title Search Search for the title of a literary work to see who wrote it and/or where it's discussed in Gale's literature criticism series. Custom Search Look for authors in the Index by name, birth date, death date, or nationality.

The Database of Arabic Literature in Western Research (DAL) is an easy-to-use, searchable, internet-based bibliographic database of Arabic literature in western research. Search Keyword and other Browse links on the left hand bar, as well as Simple Search and Advanced Search, provide easy access to detailed, annotated and content-enriched bibliographic records of books, articles, chapters of books and reviews written in English since the movement of translation and commentary of Arabic literary texts first began in the West.

Arabic Literature of Africa Online / [by J.O.Hunwick and R.S. O'Fahey] Leiden ; Boston : Brill Academic Publishers, 2015. . Arabic Literature of Africa Online (ALA) is a bio-bibliography on the Arabic manuscript tradition in the African continent, which continued well into the 20th century CE. It offers authoritative information about African authors, the texts they wrote in Arabic, the manuscripts in which these texts are found, and the locations of these manuscripts, together with bibliographical references to the literature. Arabic Literature of Africa Online complements Brockelmann's Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur (GAL) and is an indispensable reference work for students of Islamic cultures in Africa and of Islamic manuscripts in general.

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Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics The Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online comprehensively covers all aspects of Arabic languages and linguistics. It is interdisciplinary in scope and represents different schools and approaches in order to be as objective and versatile as possible. The Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online is cross-searchable and cross-referenced, and is equipped with a browsable index. All relevant fields in Arabic linguistics, both general and language specific are covered and the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online includes topics from interdisciplinary fields, such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and computer science.

Brockelmann in English : the history of the Arabic written tradition online 2017- [Leiden, The Netherlands] : Brill, 2017- [Translation of : Brockelmann, Carl, 1868-1956. Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur .] 

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Full-Text Online Arabic Sources: A Preliminary List List of online databases that contain full-text Arabic materials, i.e., which allow for searching within the texts.

al-Warraq  A depositary of classical Arab works in literature, history, fiqh, etc. Membership is required to access the library. It posts a list of the “Most read works” which is headed by A Thousand and One Nights.

kikah =  كيكا   " Kikah is an independent electronic cultural journal founded by the Iraqi writer Samuel Shimon in March 2003. Its primary objective is to encourage the dissemination of new writing from the Arab world, as well as translations from world literature."

Adab.com Arabic Poetry   ENGLISH   الشعر الفصيح  |  الشعر العامي  |  أدباء العرب  |  الشعر العالمي  |  الديوان الصوتي

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1. introduction, 2. literature review, 3. data and methods, 5. discussion, acknowledgments, competing interests, funding information, data availability, the arabic citation index: toward a better understanding of arab scientific literature.

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Jamal El-Ouahi; The Arabic Citation Index: Toward a better understanding of Arab scientific literature. Quantitative Science Studies 2023; 4 (3): 728–755. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00261

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The Arabic Citation Index (ARCI) was launched in 2020. This article provides an overview of the scientific literature contained in this new database and explores its possible usage in research evaluation. As of May 2022, ARCI had indexed 138,283 scientific publications published between 2015 and 2020. ARCI’s coverage is characterized by using the metadata available in scientific publications. First, I investigate the distributions of the indexed literature at various levels (research domains, countries, languages, open access). Articles make up nearly all the documents indexed with a share of 99% of ARCI. The Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences fields have the highest concentration of publications. Most indexed journals are published in Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. About 8% of publications in ARCI are published in languages other than Arabic. Second, I use an unsupervised machine learning model, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and the text mining algorithm of VOSviewer to uncover the main topics in ARCI. These methods provide a better understanding of ARCI’s thematic structure. Next, I discuss how ARCI can complement global standards in the context of a more inclusive research evaluation. Finally, I suggest a few research opportunities after discussing the findings of this study.

https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway/wos/peer-review/10.1162/qss_a_00261

Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world and is used by more than 400 million people. Arabic was also the lingua franca during the Islamic Golden Age, serving as the language of science, poetry, literature, governance, and art. It played a catalytic role in developing scientific knowledge, building upon earlier traditions from Europe, China, Persia, India, and Africa. For centuries, science was done in several languages, until the rise and domination of English in the 20th century ( Gordin, 2015 ).

Nowadays, scientific research is still a polyglot activity, but research excellence is often equated to publishing in English in high-impact factor journals, as stated in the third principle of the Leiden Manifesto ( Hicks, Wouters et al., 2015 ). This is also stated in the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication: “multilingual work should be fully acknowledged in scholarly assessments and English should not have more weight than other languages in communication” ( The Committee for Public Information in Finland, European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities et al., 2019 ). Publishing in English has been largely discussed as a controversial topic in the literature ( Aalbers, 2004 ; Coles, 1989 ; Garfield, 1989 ; Jiménez-Contreras & Ferreiro-Aláez, 1996 ; Pittler & Ernst, 2005 ; Short, Boniche et al., 2001 ). This is problematic for the Humanities and Social Sciences, where research tends to be more engaged on national issues and published in local languages. Recent years have also seen a rapid development of new journals around the world. Identifying peer-reviewed journals of regional relevance and importance is a major issue for all scientific stakeholders ( Moed, de Moya-Anegon et al., 2021 ). Such journals provide a valuable bibliometric data source on emerging issues. Protecting excellence in locally relevant scientific research is also key to preserving fields that have regional or national dimensions. Franssen and Wouters (2019) provide an extensive literature review of bibliometric publications that study the humanities between 1965 and 2018. In their review, Franssen and Wouters distinguish two periods in which the bibliometric system is configured in a variety of ways: the period 1965–1980s is characterized by bibliometrics embedded in a sociological theoretical framework, whereas the 1980s–present period is marked by the embedding of bibliometric methodologies in the science policy and research evaluation contexts.

In 2020, the Arabic Citation Index (ARCI) was launched in the Web of Science (WoS) platform, first in Egypt and later in the rest of the Arab World. Clarivate Analytics partnered with the Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB), as part of the Egyptian Ministry of Education, to develop the first ACI. This launch is also part of Egypt’s Vision 2030, in which knowledge, innovation, and scientific research are key pillars to achieve scientific excellence ( Egyptian Government, 2016 ). As mentioned by Dr Shawki, Minister of Education & Technical Education in Egypt and President of the EKB Project, the “aim is to work toward becoming a more knowledgeable Egyptian community that encourages learning as a part of everyday life. We look forward to building our economy and exporting our sciences globally in the Arabic language.” ( Clarivate Analytics, 2018 ).

The focus of ARCI is on the scholarly research published in journals of publishers based in the 22 countries of the Arab League in which Arabic is an official language (Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen). Here, Arabic is “Modern Standard Arabic (MSA),” the formal written standard widely used in the media, education, and scientific research throughout the Arab world. It is worth remembering that Arabic is a language with a diverse range of regional dialects. Although these dialects are authentic native languages, they are rarely used in formal communication and are not standardized or taught in schools ( Habash, 2010 ). MSA is based on the syntactic, morphological, and phonological features of Classical Arabic ( Habash, 2010 ), which is the language of the Quran.

ARCI joins other regional citation databases in WoS: the Chinese Science Citation Database, the Korean Journal Database (KCI), the SciELO Citation Index, and the Russian Science Citation Index (SCI). ARCI uses the same core features of WoS with a new Arabic language interface in addition to the classic English language interface. This new interface allows the user to run search queries in Arabic to find relevant records or researchers. The criteria for inclusion in ARCI are a subset of the WoS Core Collection criteria ( Clarivate Analytics, 2019 ). The journals covered in ARCI are selected by a newly established editorial board with members from Arab League countries who provide subject knowledge and regional insights. The selection process for ARCI is based on traditional scientific publishing standards and the scholarly research norms of the Arab region, which include peer review. However, the peer-review methods, such as single-anonymous and double-blind, are not described. First, there is an initial triage to confirm content accessibility and format for all titles considered for indexation in ARCI. All journals must have an ISSN. Several elements are evaluated in this first step: journal title, publisher information, URL for online journals, content access, DOI/pagination, and timeliness/volume. Next, the journals are reviewed from an editorial perspective. In this second step, each journal is evaluated to confirm that it provides scholarly content, with a clear scope statement, article abstracts, cited references, content relevance with the stated scope or mission, quality of language consistent with scientific communications, and an editorial board reflective of the field of the journal.

The indexing provided in ARCI aims to increase the exposure of Arabic-language research, allowing it to contribute to regional and worldwide research efforts. ARCI is a new addition to the WoS platform, and a separate subscription is required to access it. There is relatively little information available regarding this new database, which many scholars are still unfamiliar with. The content coverage of a database can be assessed from a variety of perspectives, including coverage of indexed publication sources, document types, disciplines and subject fields, publication language, and impact. An assessment of content coverage of a bibliometric database can only be made by conducting a large-scale analysis. Additionally, some features of a specific database and their potential uses can also influence its suitability for particular tasks, such as research discovery or research evaluation. This study contributes to the literature in which metadata of publications is analyzed bibliometrically to profile specific scholarly communities and publication practices ( Franssen & Wouters, 2019 ). Therefore, the goal of this research is to describe the literature found in this new citation index. The main objective is to examine the regional research landscape from diverse perspectives. Such a study can help research managers and policymakers to better understand the regional research activity, by providing a more in-depth analysis of publication practices in a specific region.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. First, I provide a review of the scientometric literature on the inclusiveness of WoS. Second, the data and methods used to conduct the analyses are expanded upon. Following that, I investigate a few content distributions at various levels (research domains, countries, languages, and open access [OA]). Next, I examine the primary subjects covered in ARCI by using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model and the text mining algorithms of VOSviewer ( van Eck & Waltman, 2010 ). Then, I discuss the role ARCI might play as a regional complement to global standards from a research evaluation perspective. Finally, I discuss the results of this study, identify its limitations, and suggest a few research directions.

In the past 30 years, there have been some debates about the inclusiveness of bibliographic databases such as WoS. For instance, Gibbs (1995) claimed that the SCI in WoS was biased toward Global North English-language scientific journals. Garfield (1997) responded that a statistically valid definition of bias was needed to conclude whether WoS was biased against so-called “Third World” journals, referring to the law of concentration applied to science journals or Bradford law ( Garfield, 1996 ). Later, Hicks (1999) discussed the difficulty of achieving full comprehensiveness of international social science literature and the bibliometric consequences this might have. One of her arguments was that the polyglot character of the social sciences might make them more difficult to cover in a single database.

During the past decade, many nations around the world, such as Australia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Norway, Poland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and many others have chosen to implement performance-based research funding ( Aagaard, 2015 ; Hicks, 2012 ; Kulczycki, 2017 ; Tonta, 2017 ) and incentive schemes ( Franzoni, Scellato, & Stephan, 2011 ; Quan, Chen, & Shu, 2017 ). Such incentives are mostly related to the publication activities of researchers ( Rochmyaningsih, 2019 ), which are traditionally analyzed by using multidisciplinary bibliographic data sources such as the WoS, Scopus, Google Scholar, Dimensions, and Crossref. These databases are all constructed in different ways, and hence all differ in terms of coverage of journals, document types, languages, disciplines, and citation indexing. Such coverage differences have been the focus of various studies ( Martín-Martín, Thelwall et al., 2021 ; Mongeon & Paul-Hus, 2016 ; Singh, Singh et al., 2021 ; Vera-Baceta, Thelwall, & Kousha, 2019 ; Visser, van Eck, & Waltman, 2021 ). Mongeon and Paul-Hus (2016) find that English-language journals are overrepresented to the detriment of publications in other journals. They also show that the results of bibliometric analyses may differ depending on the bibliographic data source used. It has also been shown that research published in Social Sciences and Humanities mostly stays unnoticed when bibliometric sources such as the WoS and Scopus are used for research ( Aksnes & Sivertsen, 2019 ; Liu, Shi, & Li, 2017 ; Mongeon & Paul-Hus, 2016 ; Van Leeuwen, Moed et al., 2001 ). Moreover, as stated in the Leiden Manifesto ( Hicks et al., 2015 ), research articles published in English are often considered to represent a high standard of quality. This has been studied in several European countries by Ochsner, Kulczycki, and Gedutis (2018) and Sīle, Pölönen et al. (2018) .

According to Sivertsen (2018) , the use of local language in scholarship is essential to promote interaction with stakeholders and the general public. This is also essential if science wants to fulfill its social obligations or have localized impacts ( Garcia-Ramon, 2003 ; Hasse & Fischer, 2003 ; Huang, 2011 ; Samers, 2000 ). However, if evaluation regimes have an impact on publication practices and if they modify research agendas, researchers may decide to shift away from locally relevant research in favor of English-language audiences ( Bianco, Gras, & Sutz, 2016 ). It is also worth remembering that different languages and communication venues affect different audiences ( Hicks, 2004 ). Non-English journals serve communication functions that are distinct from those of mainstream English journals, as demonstrated by Chavarro, Tang, and Ràfols (2017) : They provide researchers with opportunities for initiation into scientific publication and they address topics that might be underrepresented in mainstream publication titles.

Such issues have been discussed by several groups who have set multiple initiatives to enhance research evaluation. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment ( https://sfdora.org ) emphasizes that the publications’ scientific content is more significant than the journals’ publication metrics. Wilsdon, Allen et al. (2015) argue that evaluation should promote the diversity and plurality of research in the Metric Tide report. In the Leiden Manifesto, authors call to protect excellence in locally relevant research ( Hicks et al., 2015 ). More recently, the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication has been launched to encourage the dissemination of research findings in all languages ( The Committee for Public Information in Finland et al., 2019 ). In that sense, regional or national databases that are created to comprehensively cover all subjects and languages are therefore crucial to develop a more balanced multilingualism in scholarly communication. The need to create national citation indexes was also discussed by Pislyakov (2007) . There are several examples of such databases created to cover non-English scientific literature in Brazil ( Packer, Biojone et al., 1998 ), China ( Jin & Wang, 1999 ; Su, Deng, & Shen, 2014 ; Ye, 2014 ), India ( Yadav & Yadav, 2014 ), Japan ( Negishi, Sun, & Shigi, 2004 ), Korea ( Seol & Park, 2008 ), Russia ( Moskaleva, Pislyakov et al., 2018 ), Serbia ( Pajic, 2015 ), and Taiwan ( Chen, 2004 ). The common objective of these developments is to provide more visibility and easier access to journals publishing scientific papers in languages other than English.

There is also research on how well various bibliographic databases are able to provide global complete coverage of the scientific literature, with special attention paid to the proper coverage of journals published in languages other than English or in countries of the Global South. Garfield (1995) noted that the SCI and ISI’s other products were selective; hence they were not comprehensive in terms of coverage of scientific journals published globally. Chavarro, Ràfols, and Tang (2018) explored the extent to which the indexation in WoS might be an indicator of quality. They found that journals with comparable features and editorial requirements were often treated differently because of their publication country, field of study, and language. They warned research evaluators and joined other authors in urging caution in terms of research evaluation ( Alperin, 2014 ; Garfield, 1995 ; Mounier, 2018 ): Indeed, a multidimensional picture of local research would be obtained by including regional or local journals.

In a recent study, Brasil (2021) gave an overview of Brazilian papers indexed in regional databases. He found that publications not included in WoS are primarily written in Portuguese, with a considerable share indexed by regional databases and covering subjects that are not addressed in WoS. Brazilian scholarship includes not only papers published in prominent international journals but also regionally pertinent topics that are mostly written for a Portuguese-speaking readership. He demonstrated that, although integrating international metrics from well-established databases could seem like a decent and straightforward way to improve the local science system, databases such as WoS do not provide the whole story. He also concludes by arguing that research evaluators should aim at developing a more comprehensive assessment framework to capture the complexity of local science by including regionally relevant databases.

ARCI has coverage back to 2015. ARCI data was extracted on May 11, 2022. Records for both 2021 and 2022 were excluded because these years were not completely indexed yet in the database, and 2021 publications are expected to be fully indexed by the end of 2022. Full records and cited references were exported from the WoS platform. The data set under study consists of 138,283 records for the 2015–2020 period. ARCI more than doubled in size in terms of number of indexed records since October 2020, when it was indexing 65,208 records for the 2015–2019 period ( El-Ouahi, 2021 ). As a result of this expansion, it is now possible to examine a wider corpus of Arabic-language scientific literature. Figure 1 presents the number of records by publication year indexed in ARCI.

Number of ARCI records by publication year (2015–2020).

This database is well structured, with 48 fields of information in each record allowing multiple bibliometric analyses (e.g., Publisher Information, Funding Information, Research Area, Open Access Indicator, Cited References, Citations, Usage Counts, ESI Highly Cited Paper/Hot Paper). In addition to essential metadata available in English as in the WoS Core Collection, ARCI has some specific information written in Arabic, such as authors names , article title , publication name , author keywords , abstract , and author address . ARCI records also show the ARCI Times Cited and the Total Times Cited Count (WoS Core Collection, ACI, BIOSIS Citation Index, Chinese Science Citation Database, Data Citation Index, Russian SCI, SciELO Citation Index) as well as the Cited References and the Cited Reference Count.

3.2. Methods and Limitations

In this study, I use bibliometric methods to characterize the literature indexed in ARCI. The objective is to examine the Arabic research landscape from various perspectives. Such analyses can help research managers and policymakers to better understand research activity in this part of the world. They can also provide a more detailed understanding of publication practices in the region. I conducted a bibliometric analysis to study the research output indexed in ARCI as follows.

A series of features can be used to profile journals. For instance, the country of the journal publisher, its editor, reviewers, authors, and readers can be analyzed to understand the geographical focus of ARCI. First, a journal distribution across countries was determined. In this study, the publisher’s country information is used to determine the geographical distribution of journals indexed in ARCI. However, it is important to be aware that a considerable number of journals would be edited and published in different countries.

Next, other aspects of the indexed literature were explored, such as the distribution of publications by research fields, languages, and access types. Then, I analyzed the scientific research output at the country level by using the authors’ addresses. A full counting method is applied in this study to report the number of publications by authors’ countries. I used the following approach to assign a country to each address: Authors’ addresses have a common structure, which consists of several elements, including the institution name, college name, department or laboratory name, city, and country. I found 74,283 addresses in ARCI. In some addresses, neither the country nor the city is available. For such cases, when available, I assigned the country of the addresses sharing the same institution name. As a result of this approach, a country was assigned to 95% of all the addresses found.

Finally, other aspects analyzed in this paper relate to the topics addressed in ARCI. I used topic modeling algorithms and text mining techniques to describe the topics discussed in the publications making up ARCI. Such methods rely on statistical analysis of the words in such publications, identifying clusters of co-occurring words, and detecting the topics discussed and the relationships between them. Many machine learning algorithms have been developed to understand, group, or search information from large text databases. In natural language processing, a topic model is a statistical model to discover the hidden semantic structures or topics that occur in a collection of documents. There are several models available, such as Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) ( Landauer, Foltz, & Laham, 1998 ), Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) ( Hofmann, 1999 ), LDA ( Blei, Ng, & Jordan, 2003 ); as well as some derived models from the latter, such as Pachinko Allocation ( Newman & Block, 2006 ) or Relational Topic Modelling ( Chang & Blei, 2009 ).

The LDA model is probably the most well-known and commonly used model. It has been proposed by Blei et al. (2003) to classify documents into topics. LDA is a generative probabilistic model of a corpus. The basic idea is that publications are composed of groups of words with no sequential relationship between them. As documents can include multiple topics, each record can be described by a distribution of topics. And each topic is characterized by a distribution over words, described as a distribution of terms in a fixed vocabulary. LDA can be used to identify a group of topics, assign a group of words to a topic, and determine the mix of topics in each publication.

The LDA model has been frequently used to examine the structure of an aggregated literature in different fields, such as in the automated analysis of abstracts of academic articles ( Griffiths & Steyvers, 2004 ) and in the analysis of the content of blogs ( McCallum, Wang, & Corrada-Emmanuel, 2007 ; Nallapati & Cohen, 2008 ). It has also been used in the study of content on Twitter ( Weng, Lim et al., 2010 ) and to recommend academic publications ( Jiang, Jia et al., 2012 ). More recently, it has been applied for the detection of topics in large collections of press articles ( Lee, Lo et al., 2015 ).

Previous studies have shown that LDA performed well to understand the topical structure of a scientific corpus ( Han, 2020 ; Suominen & Toivanen, 2016 ; Yau, Porter et al., 2014 ). Although LDA can produce excellent estimation results, it has two main limitations. First, determining the topic correlations between each of the topics is difficult. Second, before applying LDA, one must define the number of topics to model the corpus, which is typically unknown in advance. Determining the natural number of topics is a controversial issue ( Arun, Suresh et al., 2010 ). Although various computational approaches have been proposed to optimize the number of topics ( Griffiths & Steyvers, 2004 ; Zhao, Chen et al., 2015 ), several authors argue that human judgment is the best way to define the number of topics ( Graham & Milligan, 2012 ; Newman & Block, 2006 ). The latter approach is the one used in this study.

As VOSviewer does not support the Arabic language, LDA is applied to ARCI as follows to better understand the topical structure of ARCI based on the corpus content written in Arabic. This research was limited to words written in the Arabic alphabet. Because there was no access to the full texts of the publications and because the titles, abstracts, and keywords summarize the full contents of publications, the analyzed corpus of documents consists of combinations of words available in the title, abstract, and author keywords of each of the 138,283 records downloaded from ARCI. Normalization of characters was applied to the corpus to remove Latin characters. Stemming and lemmatization procedures were applied and stop words were removed based on a standard list of stop words for Arabic ( Brahmi, Ech-Cherif, & Benyettou, 2012 ). There are many publicly available tools for LDA. Here, I applied the LdaModel available in Gensim, a well-known Python programming library widely used in unsupervised machine learning.

With regard to the VOSviewer term mapping, the analysis is limited to words written in the Roman script languages. At the very least, the title of each record in ARCI is also written in English and 84% of the records have an abstract written in English. VOS viewer has basically two limitations. The first is imposed by the data, which includes some noise. Authors make choices when selecting the words and terminology used in their publications, which might include the usage of synonyms/homonyms not recognized by VOSviewer. The second limitation is related to the loss of information when terms are projected on a two-dimensional Euclidean space. Also, the map includes specialized terms and more general ones which can be used in various contexts. As a result of these limitations, a map interpretation should always be done with caution.

First, I analyze the research domains in ARCI by number of records and the proportion they represent in the database. Next, I present the journals distribution by countries. Then, the most productive countries are examined, followed by an analysis of the languages of publications and their access types. Finally, I focus on the main topics covered in the Arabic scientific literature indexed in ARCI.

4.1. Research Areas Distribution

Research areas 1 constitute a subject categorization scheme that is shared by all WoS product databases. This scheme is particularly helpful when analyzing documents from multiple databases related to the same research areas. All 153 research areas in the WoS are grouped into five broad categories: Arts & Humanities, Life Sciences & Biomedicine, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences, and Technology.

I relied on the journal category and not on the topics covered in the individual publications to analyze the disciplinary coverage in ARCI. These categories or areas, which are defined at the journal level, are used as proxies for scientific fields. The ARCI records relate to 21 research areas in the data set under study. Currently, 23,864 records (around 17% of ARCI), do not contain data in the Research Area field. In Figure 2 , I summarize the share of records by research area in the database. I have limited the analysis to the 15 research areas with a share higher than 1%. Film, Radio & Television, Communication, Sociology, Social Work, Geography, Music, Psychiatry, and Demography all have a share below 1%.

Share (%) of documents by research areas in ARCI (2015–2020).

Arts & Humanities Other Topics, Business & Economics, and Social Sciences Other Topics are the three main WoS categories of records found in ARCI. As per the WoS classification, the Arts & Humanities Other Topics category excludes the following Arts & Humanities research areas: Architecture, Art, Asian Studies, Classics, Dance, Film, Radio & Television, History, History & Philosophy of Science, Literature, Music, Philosophy, Religion, and Theatre.

And the Social Sciences Other Topics category excludes the Social Sciences research categories listed hereinafter: Archaeology, Area Studies, Biomedical Social Sciences, Business & Economics, Communication, Criminology & Penology, Cultural Studies, Demography, Development Studies, Education & Educational Research, Ethnic Studies, Family Studies, Geography, Government & Law, International Relations, Linguistics, Mathematical Methods in Social Sciences, Psychology, Public Administration, Social Issues, Social Work, Sociology, Urban Studies, and Women’s Studies.

I have also summarized the shares of the number of papers within each of the five broad domains in Figure 3 . This figure shows that ARCI contains mainly journals in the Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences categories.

Share (%) of documents by broad categories in ARCI (2015–2020).

These categories represent 81% of ARCI total coverage. Journals in Life Sciences & Biomedicine account for 5% of the coverage. As mentioned earlier, 17% of records retrieved do not contain information about the research area. It is worth noting there are no journals related to Technology or Physical Science categories. This confirms the current focus of ARCI. Regional issues in Arts & Humanities as well as Social Sciences dominate the ARCI coverage.

ARCI also offers its own research categories. When analyzing the records with the ARCI classification, only 243 records do not contain information about the research categories, representing less than 0.18% of the total database. The alluvial diagram in Figure 4 shows the numbers of records as per ARCI’s own research categories, represented by the sizes of the nodes, along with the corresponding numbers as per WoS research areas.

Number of documents by research areas in ARCI (2015–2020) as per ARCI’s categories (left) and corresponding WoS research areas (right).

We retrieve similar results, with several research categories commonly shared between the research schemas in WoS and ARCI. However, some differences emerge. ARCI offers more research areas (35) than WoS (24) for the data set under study. Several WoS categories correspond to more precise research areas in ARCI. For instance, the Cultural Studies area in WoS consists of Language & Linguistics and the following categories in ARCI: Islamic Studies, Islamic Jurisprudence, Islamic Creed, Quranic Studies, and Hadith which are fields well studied in the Arab region. The Business & Economics category in WoS is broken down into three categories in ARCI: Business, Economics, and Management. There is also a distinction between Literature and Poetry in ARCI, which are both classified as Literature in the WoS classification. Law and Political Science in ARCI are both categorized as Government & Law in WoS. Finally, two of the major WoS categories in ARCI shown on the right-hand side, Arts & Humanities—Other Topics and Social Sciences—Other Topics, are matched mainly with the Humanities, Multidisciplinary and Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary categories in ARCI as well as other ARCI research areas.

4.2. Content Coverage by Publisher’s Country

In this section, I analyze the coverage by country. First, I examine the types of documents indexed in ARCI. Table 1 lists the number of documents per type and the share they represent in the database.

Number and share of ARCI records by document type (2015–2020)

ARCI is primarily composed of journal articles. Close to 99% of documents indexed are articles. Other document types all represent less than 1% of the database.

Now, I focus on the distribution of journals over countries published in the Arab League countries. As mentioned earlier, each journal is assigned to a country based on the country in which the publisher is located. But, before analyzing the country distribution in ARCI, I examined the coverage of Arab journals in the various citation indices in the WoS Core Collection: SCI Expanded (SCIE), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), and Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI). This coverage is presented in Figure 5 . ESCI was launched in 2015, with backfiles dating back to 2005. It covers all disciplines with international and broad scope publications as well as regional or specialty area focus. ESCI differs from SCIE, SSCI, and AHCI in terms of the process used by Clarivate to select journals. This process uses a set of 28 criteria to evaluate journals. These criteria are split into 24 quality criteria (editorial rigor and best practice at the journal level) and four impact criteria to select the most impactful journals in their field by using citation activity as the main indicator of impact. Journals that meet the 24 quality criteria are indexed in ESCI, and journals that meet the four additional impact criteria enter SCIE, SSCI, or AHCI based on their subject category. 2

Number of journals by Arab country in WoS CC citation indices (September 2020).

As of October 2020, 21,419 journals were indexed in WoS CC. Of these, 144 journals (or 0.67%) are published in 13 of the 22 Arab League countries: 66 in SCIE, 1 in SCIE and SSCI, and 77 in ESCI. Out of these 144 journals, 134 (93%) are published in English only. The remaining 10 journals (7%) have published papers in several languages during the study period: English (78%), French (12.6%), Arabic (5.8%), Spanish (3.4%), Afrikaans (0.05%), and Italian (0.05%). The United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt and Saudi Arabia are the three most represented Arab countries in WoS CC with 113 journals and a share of 78% of all journals published in the Arab region and indexed in WoS CC.

Although the criteria for inclusion in ARCI are a subset of the WoS Core Collection selection process, there is no overlap between WoS CC and ARCI. The distribution by country of publisher in ARCI is represented in Figure 6 . ARCI indexes content from 19 of the 22 Arab League countries. Content for Djibouti, Comoros, and Somalia is not indexed yet. As of June 2021, 613 journals were indexed in ARCI. Journals published in Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia represent 83% of the journals indexed in ARCI. Again, this analysis does not take into account the location of the editor but the publisher’s country. There might also exist journals publishing scientific literature in Arabic but located in countries not part of the Arab League.

Share (%) of journals by country in ARCI (2015–2020).

Egypt and Algeria together publish more than 60% of the journals indexed in ARCI. There is currently a high concentration of journals published from these two countries in ARCI. Then, 22.3% of the ARCI journals are published in Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia with respective shares of 11.1%, 6.0%, and 5.2%. Such concentration might be due to several reasons, such as publishers’ awareness and readiness in specific countries to provide their journals’ data for indexation.

The submission process is managed through the EKB website ( http://arcival.ekb.eg/ ) and journals are evaluated by an independent editorial board according to the ARCI selection process, as explained in the introduction of this paper. Publishers in countries that have set up national journal platforms and initiatives might also have an advantage in providing journals’ data more easily as per publishing standards and selection criteria of indexing databases. For example, the Algerian Scientific Journal Platform (ASJP) ( www.asjp.cerist.dz ) has been developed by the Ministry of Higher Education & Research in Algeria. ASJP consists of 757 journals and more than 187,000 articles. Another similar initiative is the Iraqi Academic Scientific Journal platform ( www.iasj.net ), set up by the Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research of Iraq. IASJ currently lists more than 218,000 articles published in 361 OA peer-reviewed journals by 92 Iraqi universities and research institutions. Similarly, the Ministry of Higher Education and Research in Morocco developed the portal of Moroccan scientific journals ( https://revues.imist.ma ), which includes 186 scientific journals. The common goal of all these initiatives is to improve the visibility of local journals by improving their publishing standards.

The heatmap in Figure 7 shows the contribution to each research category in terms of number of journals by country of publisher in ARCI between 2015 and 2020. Such visualization is useful to understand the level of contribution and specialization of each country. Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia contribute to most research categories. Although Egypt has the highest contribution in Education (41 journals in ARCI), Algerian publishers contribute the most to scientific research in Business and Economics (47) and publishers in Iraq show a higher level of focus on Humanities (23). We notice that publishers in Algeria also contribute the most to Social Sciences (30), Humanities (26), Language & Literature (26), and Law & Political Science (25).

Number of journals by publisher’s country and research category in ARCI (2015–2020).

ARCI is still new and is still growing. Considering, the initiatives taken by governments to improve the visibility and the publishing standards of local journals, it will be interesting to analyze how this new citation index will evolve over time in terms of coverage by journals’ countries and research category.

4.3. Languages Coverage

Table 2 shows the coverage of records in terms of language of publications in ARCI. Arabic obviously dominates the database with 126,968 publications, representing a share of around 91.8%. As ARCI aims to provide more exposure to journals published in the Arab League countries, it is no surprise to see Arabic as the dominant language in this database. The second most represented language is English, with 7,849 records (5.68%), followed by 2,960 publications in French (2.14%). The 506 publications in 10 other languages represent 0.37% of this database.

Number and share of records by language in ARCI (2015–2020)

Fifty-six records have an “unspecified” language in WoS, which consist of 55 publications in Kurdish and one in Amazigh. The languages of these records were found by identifying the language used in the full text of the related publications. Today, the two principal written Kurdish dialects are Kurmanji and Sorani. Along with Arabic, Sorani is one of the two official languages of Iraq and is simply referred to as “Kurdish” in political documents. The Amazigh language, also known as Tamazight, is widely spoken in Northern Africa. It became an official language of Morocco in 2011 along with Arabic. Arabic and Tamazight are also the official languages of Algeria since 1963 for the former and since 2016 for the latter.

It is also worth remembering that many journals indexed in ARCI provide publication in multiple languages. Several countries from the Arab League are former British or French colonies, which explains why English and French are the main non-Arabic languages in ARCI. The presence of English is also not surprising, because many local journals use English as their language of publication in order to reach a larger community. Other languages may suggest that research published in ARCI journals might also tackle regional issues of interest with neighboring countries.

4.4. Coauthorship Structure and Research Output by Country

Analyzing the research output at the authors’ address level is also particularly useful to understand the regional publication practices and how they relate to the social structures that we find in specific research fields, such as the Humanities.

The first element analyzed here is the coauthorship structure found in ARCI. In research evaluation and management, coauthorship information is often used to characterize scientific collaboration relations ( Glanzel, 2001 ). Table 3 reports the distribution of records in ARCI by number of authors along with the share of the database they represent between 2015 and 2020.

Distribution and share of records by number of authorships in ARCI (2015–2020)

As presented in Table 3 , the most common type of authorship in ARCI is single authorship, with a share of about 66%. This shows that there is a marked preference for single-author work. This is not surprising, considering single authorship is a common practice in humanities and social sciences, which represent a high share of ARCI. Next, double and triple authorship publications represent respectively about 25% and 6.8% of ARCI. Less than 1.6% of publications indexed in ARCI are coauthored by four or more authors.

In Figure 8 , the focus is on the authorship structure by research category.

Share of single and multiple authorships by research category in ARCI (2015–2020).

In some research fields, single authorship is rather the norm and in others collaborative work is more frequent. In the first case, Cultural Studies, Quranic Studies, Poetry, Hadith, Islamic Creed, and Social Work all show a share of single authorship publications higher than 90%. On the other hand, multiauthorship is more frequent in Geography (61%), Special Education (53%), Management (52%), Economics (51%), Sport Sciences (49%), Psychiatry (41%), and Education & Educational Research (40%). These results suggest that those areas exhibit a more collaborative aspect.

The second element analyzed in this section is the research output by country based on the authors’ affiliation(s). Figure 9 presents the number of records indexed in ARCI by authors’ country for countries with more than 100 records assigned to them. Algeria dominates, with close to 33,000 publications. Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan then follow. Most countries in Figure 9 are part of the Arab League but some cases stand out, such as Iran, Malaysia, the United States, France, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

Number of records indexed in ARCI by country for countries with more than 100 publications (2015–2020).

4.5. Main Topics

As mentioned earlier, before applying LDA, one must define the number of topics for the corpus. One option is to examine the performance of text clustering on a small data set. Another way is to choose the number of topics based on judgments or tests ( Blei et al., 2003 ). Similarly to the term map obtained in Section 4.6 , the corpus is organized into six topics, which are listed in Table 4 .

The six main topics found in ARCI and the related number of documents (2015–2020)

As mentioned earlier, the model is applied on the combinations of words available in the title, abstract, and author keywords of all records indexed in ARCI. I limited my study to words written in Arabic. A total of 97% of all the publications found in ARCI have the title written in Arabic and 81% also have an abstract in Arabic. Titles, abstracts, and keywords written in Roman script languages are not analyzed in this subsection. It is relatively straightforward to interpret the topics generated by the LDA model. The results are useful to understand the topical structure of ARCI by highlighting the main topics covered in the Arabic scientific literature indexed in ARCI.

These topics are not described in detail in this study, because a certain level of expertise is required to perform such analysis. As mentioned earlier, ARCI also provides some valuable information in English. For instance, 84% of the records found in ARCI also have an abstract in English, which can be used to conduct a topic analysis by focusing on the content written in English as well.

4.6. Term Map

When applying the LDA model on a corpus, it is assumed that one document can address multiple topics. As shown in Table 5 , this is helpful to have a precise understanding of the topical structure of a large corpus. However, it does not map the relationships between topics. The purpose of building a so-called “term map” of the publications in ARCI is to further clarify their contents. I used VOSviewer ( van Eck & Waltman, 2010 ) to create such a map.

The 10 most frequently occurring terms in each cluster of ARCI (2015–2020)

Titles, abstracts, and author keywords have been combined into a single string which has been used by the text mining algorithms of VOSviewer. I have limited this analysis to terms that occur at least 15 times. Out of the 259,941 terms found, 7,317 terms satisfied this threshold. For each of the 7,317 terms, relevance scores are calculated based on co-occurrence links by VOSviewer. Based on this score, the most relevant terms are shown. VOSviewer offers a default choice of 60% of all the terms. Figure 10 shows the co-occurrence network for the 60% or 4,390 most relevant terms, indicating for each pair of terms the number of papers in which these terms appear together.

Term map highlighting the main topics in ARCI (2015–2020).

The clustering is useful in delineating the topics covered as well as highlighting the relatedness between them. The horizontal and vertical axes have no meaning. The size of a term reflects the number of records in which this specific term is mentioned. The proximity of two terms is an indicator of how these terms are related based on the number of co-occurrences. In general, groups of terms closely located together can be interpreted as topics. Figure 10 displays the term map highlighting the main topics in ARCI (2015–2020). For readability purposes, labels are shown only for selected terms to avoid overlapping labels. The map can also be explored interactively online ( https://tinyurl.com/2ol3qxwk ) and the labels of the less visible terms and phrases can be seen by zooming in on specific map areas.

The terms have been clustered into seven clusters with different colors. The term map shown in Figure 9 indicates some clear distinctions between research areas. The map confirms a broad coverage of scientific literature as shown previously in the topic analysis. These distinctions are not only visible in the structure in terms of proximity between terms but also in terms of colors. Within an area of the map, terms are usually colored in a consistent way. For example, the lower left parts in blue and teal include research areas closely related to Economics and Finance. These clusters include terms such as economic growth , monetary policy , inflation , islamic bank , and corporate governance . In the upper part of the map, purple corresponds to research areas related to Religion and Literature, such as holy quran , translation , interpretation , phonology , rhythm , rhetoric , and textual approach . Terms corresponding to the field of Law tend to be located mainly in the yellow part of the map, with terms such as law , islamic jurisprudence , contract(s) , arbitration , protection , and justice . The Religion and History cluster in red is closely related to the Literature and Law parts. It includes terms such as allah , religion , peace , prophet , muhammad (peace be upon him) , sunnah and andalusia , century , revolution . Finally, the lower right parts in green and orange correspond respectively to Education and Sports in general, with some distinction on several aspects such as training program , academic achievement , disorder , psychological empowerment (green) and player , physical ability , football , and physical fitness (orange).

There is a clear heterogeneity in terms of topics covered in ARCI. One should remember that some of the terms can of course be used in various contexts. For more information on each cluster, Table 5 lists the 10 most frequently occurring terms in each cluster.

The last few years have seen the development of several OA options ( Bosman & Kramer, 2018 ; Lewis, 2012 ). OA, and other new technological opportunities, such as electronic publishing or open repositories, have changed the scholarly publishing landscape; one effect has been increased accessibility of research output, such as publications. Several scholars have studied the advantage of OA in terms of readership as well as citation impact ( Basson, Blanckenberg, & Prozesky, 2020 ; Cintra, Furnival, & Milanez, 2018 ; Morillo, 2020 ; Piwowar, Priem et al., 2018 ; Riera & Aibar, 2013 ; Tang, Bever, & Yu, 2017 ; Torres-Salinas, Robinson-García, & Moed, 2019 ; Young & Brandes, 2020 ). One of the key issues of recent OA developments has been to understand to which extent the current scientific literature is already published in OA and how that share is evolving in relation to the total growth of the scientific literature. Thus, from research evaluation and management perspectives, it is critical to understand how OA is adopted by the regional research community.

DOAJ Gold : Journal articles from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). To be listed on the DOAJ, each article in these journals needs to have a license that complies with the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

Gold Hybrid : Other Gold OA papers that are not published in journals on the DOAJ’s list but that are identified by Our Research as having a Creative Commons (CC) license. These papers are primarily published in hybrid journals.

Free to read : These articles’ licensing is either ambiguous or Our Research has identified them as non-CC license articles. These are public access or free-to-read articles that can be found on a publisher’s website.

Green Published : Final published versions of publications hosted in an institutional or subject-based repository.

Green Submitted : Version of a manuscript that has been submitted and is available in an institutional or topical repository.

Green Accepted : Accepted manuscript hosted in a repository. The final, peer-reviewed content might not have gone through copy-editing or typesetting by the publisher.

Non-OA : Publications that do not have an OA status.

I use this information to analyze the access type of records indexed in ARCI. The statistics for various OA types and non-OA records in ARCI are presented in Table 6 .

Number and share of records by Open-Access type in ARCI (2015–2020)

Close to 31% of papers indexed in ARCI and published between 2015 and 2020 are openly accessible. This is below the average share of 36% of OA documents in the WoS Core Collection for the same period. We notice that the various OA types have different shares in ARCI. Free to read or Bronze is the main OA type, with 29,927 papers representing about 21% of ARCI. DOAJ Gold has the second highest OA share (8.2%) in this database with 11,386 papers published with this OA type. Also, it is worth noting that the OA type is unknown for the 10,200 papers in ARCI (7.4%) that do not have a DOI.

Figure 11 shows the trends of OA shares in ARCI and WoS between 2015 and 2020. Due to their relatively low shares, Gold-Hybrid, Green Published, Green Submitted and Green Accepted were excluded from this analysis. ARCI shows a lower share of all OA documents compared to WoS, but ARCI presents a similar uptrend. In terms of the share of Gold OA in ARCI, although it has been increasing since 2017, it represents about half the share of Gold OA in WoS. Last, the share of Bronze OA in ARCI has been stable since 2015 and is about three times higher than in WoS.

Trends of shares of records by OA type in ARCI and in WoS (2015–2020).

Such analysis is useful in terms of research management and OA organization. ARCI provides insights on OA practices in the Arab region. Although the original goal of OA was to make scientific findings accessible to everyone, one development was to shift the expenses of article processing charges (APCs) to the scientific authors. Although scientific papers published in OA can be accessed by everyone, research cannot always be published under the APC-based OA model. Indeed, as Arab League nations are mainly developing or emerging countries, the overall lower share of OA content in ARCI compared to WoS might be due to high APCs that researchers might not be able to afford without proper funding mechanisms. However, it is also important to note other ways in which OA can be realized, such as Diamond, Bronze and Green OA, which do not have APCs.

Currently, many governmental institutions fund the publication of journals and/or support the cost of journal subscriptions with public funds. They also have now to cover the funding of APC. The Global Open Access Portal (GOAP) presented a snapshot of the status of OA to scientific information worldwide. As identified in the GOAP, the Arab states face challenges but also opportunities ( UNESCO, 2016 ). The low level of awareness of the OA potential for researchers, publishers, and policymakers tops the list of challenges. Lack of policy regulation, research funders’ OA mandates and resources to manage OA projects also contribute to the low OA penetration in the Arab world. Nevertheless, several projects and initiatives have been undertaken already to promote OA in the Arab region. Seventy experts and policy specialists from several Arab countries met in September 2015 to develop strategies to implement OA to scientific information and research in the Arab countries ( UNESCO, 2015 ). The Directory of Free Arab Journals (DFAJ), the first Arab directory of OA journals, which provides access to journals published by 172 publishers from 17 Arab countries, is also an example of such an initiative.

The main objective of this study was to examine the structure of ARCI. As of June 2021, 613 Arabic journals were indexed in ARCI. This indexation brings several benefits to the scientific community. This new index will improve the visibility of Arabic journals by making them more accessible. All journals indexed in ARCI need to meet selection criteria, and essential publication metadata are provided. Such a database could greatly enhance scholarly literature search. As a result, this will also help researchers to identify critical and influential research published in Arabic.

Research evaluation often implies the bibliometric analysis of research output ( Wilsdon et al., 2015 ; Wouters, Thelwall et al., 2015 ). Bibliometrics analysis plays an important role in research policies in many countries. Such policies involve the use of bibliometric databases to evaluate research at various levels, such as national, institutional, or author level. Indicators based on citation indices are now widely used in academic assessments ( Bornmann & Haunschild, 2018 ; Campbell, Picard-Aitken et al., 2010 ; Derrick & Pavone, 2013 ; Hicks & Melkers, 2013 ). ARCI could provide useful bibliometric data sources to research managers for science assessment and research analysis. This would be helpful to identify and reward excellence in locally relevant research ( Hicks et al., 2015 ). ARCI is also likely to attract attention from publishers and funders.

Now, I discuss in detail the main findings identified in this analysis. The main objective was to provide a brief profile of ARCI. This study reveals that ARCI contains mainly journals in the Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences categories. It is important to keep in mind the well-documented limitation on subject delineation, where I used research areas of journals as proxies of categories to characterize the subject coverage and to understand the level of contribution and specialization of each country. Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia contribute to most research categories.

As per the analysis of the publications covering the 2015–2020 period, ARCI indexes content from 19 of the 22 Arab League countries, with more than 60% of the journals indexed in ARCI being published in Egypt and Algeria, and more than 22% published in Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. As mentioned, several Ministries of Higher Education and Research have set up initiatives to improve the visibility of local journals. Such initiatives include the development of national journal platforms with a standardization of the journals’ metadata, as well as the delivery of workshops with journal editors to improve their publishing standards. As ARCI is still new and under development, it will be interesting to track its coverage growth over time.

It is worth remembering that the country of publisher of the journal is considered for its indexation in ARCI and not only the language of publication. Thus, ARCI does not yet include journals published in Arabic in countries that are not members of the Arab League. It is no surprise that the analysis of research output by country also reveals a concentration of publications by authors affiliated to institutions in Arab League nations. However, some cases stand out, such as Iran, Malaysia, the United States, France, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, which are among the top 25 contributing countries to ARCI in terms of authors’ countries. As of now, most of the content found in ARCI is composed of articles (98.9% of the database). As the Humanities traditionally tend to rely on book chapters and books, it will be interesting to analyze the evolution of the coverage by document type. Unsurprisingly, ARCI has a great share of papers published in Arabic (about 92% of the database). However, English and French are two other languages well represented in ARCI. Other languages suggest that research published in ARCI journals may also tackle regional issues of interest with neighboring regions such as Europe and Asia.

Analyzing the authorship structure in ARCI provides a better understanding of the specific dynamics involved in the production of scientific knowledge and the development of research policy. With the most common type of authorship in ARCI being single authorship, there is a strong preference for single work, which is not surprising considering that single authorship is common practice in Humanities and Social Sciences. This might also suggest a relatively low level of international or regional collaborations between researchers from the Arab League nations. Fields such as Cultural Studies, Quranic Studies, Poetry, Hadith, Islamic Creed, and Social Work all show a share of single authorship publications higher than 90%. On the other hand, multiauthorship is more frequent in other disciplines such as Geography, Special Education, Management, and Economics, which suggests that those areas exhibit a more collaborative aspect.

The topic analysis as well as the term map are helpful to better understand the underlying structure of ARCI. Such techniques provide a great overview of the topics covered in this database. Overall, the clusters found with VOSviewer seem to be closely related and show a broad coverage of ARCI. ARCI also offers the possibility to analyze the corpus in Arabic. The terms found provide useful information about the topics of regional relevance.

Around 31% of the content indexed in ARCI is openly accessible, which is below the share of OA publications indexed in WoS (36%) in the same period. The OA information available in ARCI is particularly useful to better share scientific knowledge as well as to track the adoption of local OA mandates by research managers. The insights provided by ARCI can help agencies and academic institutions in the development of policies of strategic planning and for APC funding. As a recommendation, there should be better awareness of the existing OA publication model among research institutions and researchers. The demand for funding and funding policies for the publication of papers should consequently increase in the coming years. Indeed, national governments might be able to stimulate their publishing capabilities ( Moed et al., 2021 ). They may also establish criteria or formulas for academic institution funding as well as staff evaluation for recruiting and advancement. To monitor the success of their financing strategies, research funders can also use data from journals and other sources. In the context of research management and research evaluation, information available in ARCI can be used to assess and inform research activities and performance of research stakeholders at various levels (individuals, groups, institutions, or national systems). Last, but not least, individual researchers can use the literature indexed in ARCI for their daily scholarly activities.

In conclusion, this paper offers a profile of the newest citation index in the WoS. This paper contributes also to the literature on regional citation indices ( Huang, Zhu et al., 2017 ; Jin & Wang, 1999 ; Leydesdorff & Jin, 2005 ; Moskaleva et al., 2018 ; Pajic, 2015 ; Seol & Park, 2008 ; Vélez Cuartas, Lucio Arias, & Leydesdorff, 2016 ). One common purpose of such regional databases is to provide more visibility to local journals and research published in other languages than English. As of March 2020, Arabic was the fourth most popular language online, with 5.2% of worldwide internet users, following English (25.9%), Chinese (19.4%), and Spanish (7.9%), and it is also the fastest-growing language on the internet in terms of number of Internet users between 2000 and 2021 with a growth of 9,348% ( Internet World Stats, 2020 ). With this observation, one can predict the potential increase of scientific content published in Arabic as well. Thus, ARCI is likely to have positive effects on regional research discovery as well as research management and research evaluation in the Arab region. Indeed, multidisciplinary databases, such as WoS, only provide a partial picture of research publishing activities, particularly for non-English scientific publications. These effects are still too early to see, but ARCI sets strong foundations for a more inclusive research evaluation framework in the MENA region or more specifically in Arab league nations. Future research may seek to propose detailed bibliometric mappings of ARCI based on citation data to better understand its structure. Finally, it will also be interesting to track its expansion and evolution by using dynamic topic models to study the time evolution of topics by using the text available in English as well as Arabic.

A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the ISSI 2021 conference ( El-Ouahi, 2021 ). I want to express my gratitude to Ludo Waltman and Thomas Franssen for their insightful comments on a previous version of the manuscript. I am also grateful for the feedback provided by two reviewers.

The author is an employee of Clarivate Analytics, the provider of WoS and the ACI.

This research project received no funding.

The research presented in this paper uses WoS data made available by Clarivate. The author is not allowed to share this data.

https://images.webofknowledge.com/images/help/WOS/hp_research_areas_easca.html .

https://clarivate.com/products/scientific-and-academic-research/research-discovery-and-workflow-solutions/web-of-science/core-collection/editorial-selection-process/editorial-selection-process/ .

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ARABIC LITERATURE

Tips and tricks.

1 ) CONSIDER YOUR SEARCH TERMS. For this assi gnment, focus on author name and any major literary works by said author. EXAMPLES INCLUDE author's name and/or the work and/or place of origin

" Naguib Mahfouz " or " Egypt and Naguib Mahfouz " as examples; for Adonis, you'll need to signify you mean the Syrian poet. Include those in your search terms, or use the given name Ali Ahmad Said Esber -- see here: 

“Syrian Poet Adonis.” Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition, Mar. 2021, p. 1. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=bc5859ed-86d2-3db8-af72-a1c9f6cf6281.

3) REMEMBER TO LOG INTO DATABASES ANY TIME YOU ARE WORKING OFF CAMPUS WITH A LIBRARY RESOURCE. See off campus access info below

OFF CAMPUS ACCESS

When searching at home, in a coffee shop, or anywhere off campus, you will need a username and password to log into each database.

For remote access to all databases: Please see our username and password here.

NOTE: This information should not be shared beyond the faculty, staff and students in the Cambridge School of Weston community.

Have questions? Email [email protected]

Noodletools for citation (MLA)

SCHOLARLY SOURCES (+Reference for biographical information)

LITERATURE RESEARCH CENTER (search by author or literary work-- navigate to the biography, etc.)

 ex. KHALIL GIBRAN

EBSCO DISCOVERY (search for author or literary work--find the research starter, which is an encyclopedia entry)

ex. MAHMOUD DARWISH

JSTOR ( search for author )

ex. HAFIZ IBRAHIM and AHMAD SHAUQI

Some examples of scholarly, peer reviewed articles

Allen, Roger. “The Artistry of Yūsuf Idrīs.” World Literature Today, vol. 55, no. 1, 1981, pp. 43–47. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/40135615. Accessed 25 Mar. 2024.

Moosa, Matti. “Naguib Mahfouz: Life in the Alley of Arab History.” The Georgia Review, vol. 49, no. 1, 1995, pp. 224–30. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41401631. Accessed 25 Mar. 2024.

Cooke, Miriam. “Yahya Haqqi as Critic and Nationalist.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 1981, pp. 21–34. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/163285. Accessed 25 Mar. 2024.

Young, M. J. L. “Modern Arabic Fiction in English Translation: A Review Article.” Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, 1980, pp. 147–58. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4282776. Accessed 25 Mar. 2024. *several Egyptian authors are mentioned herein

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Making Literature Travel

Leila research project.

The  LEILA Research  project, supported by the  Anna Lindh Foundation and led by Literature Across Frontiers in cooperation with the  ArabLit  collective and  iReMMO  (Institut de Recherche et d’Études Méditerranée Moyen-Orient), was implemented in 2021 as an initial research phase of the multi-year project LEILA – Arabic Literature in European Languages ,   coordinated by iReMMO.

LEILA Research project outputs

The outputs of the LEILA Research project are: studies documenting and assessing the development of literary translation into selected European languages over the past decade, essays on contemporary Arabic literature written by ArabLit founder Marcia Lynx Qualey, and English translation of a report on the Arab book market published in the original Arabic version by the Arab Publishers Association. The English translation was commissioned by iReMMo, who also convened a workshop of experts active in the field of promotion of Arabic literature in Europe.

Translation of Arabic literature into European languages in the past decade

The studies, commissioned and published by Literature Across Frontiers here , provide a perspective on the state of translation of Arabic literature in Europe over the past decade, a period marked by the aftermath of the Arab revolutions and the subsequent political turmoil, which resulted in a wave of migration creating a new Arab artistic diaspora in Europe, and Germany in particular.

The authors of the individual studies are: Adéla Provazníková (Czech), Arjwan Al Fayle (Dutch), Alexandra Büchler and Abdel-Wahab Khalifa (English), Maria Pakkala (Finnish), Sandra Hetzl (German), Persa Koumoutsi (Greek), Mariangela Masullo with Pamela Murgia (Italian), Marcin Michalski (Polish), and Bachir Mahyub Rayaa with Angelina Gutiérrez Almenara (Spanish and other co-official languages of Spain). Some of the authors have so far presented the findings of their research in progress at two book fairs, London and Prague.

The wider context of translation mapping in the Euro-Mediterranean region

The present studies are to be seen in the context of the Anna Lindh Foundation’s continued support for arts and culture as a force for dialogue and empowerment of civil societies. The Foundation identified translation as an activity strategically important for the region, and in 2010 launched a multi-faceted project focused on translation, in partnership with Literature Across Frontiers and the French organisation Transeuropéennes. The project consisted of a series of consultations and capacity building activities implemented by LAF, as well as an extensive research effort coordinated by Transeuropéennes, which resulted in the landmark 2012 report A Mapping of Translation in the Euro-Med-Region that summarised the findings of some sixty studies on translation flows in the region. These activities brought together the region’s professionals active in the field of translation, and prepared the way for the programme ‘Translation for Dialogue’ with conferences held in Egypt, Slovenia and Tunisia in the period 2015-2017. The present studies will contribute to a continuation of this effort and inform an on-going debate around translation in the region.

Unfortunately, ten years later, the majority of the translation mapping outputs are no longer available online, with the exception of studies covering Eastern Europe, conducted by the Next Page Foundation in Sofia and the reports on translation from Arabic, Hebrew and Turkish into English, published by Literature Across Frontiers in 2011-12, available in our research section here .

The LEILA Research project was implemented with the support of

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Volume 2 (1) Special Issue: Arabic Literature in Translation: Politics and Poetics

Related Papers

Routledge Companion to World Literature (2nd Edition), Eds. David Damrosch, Theo D’haen, and Djelal Kadir

Tarek El-Ariss

Mugahed Alheshami

In the aim of achieving greater visibility, too many Arab literary texts have been translated into English. Actually, this work gives focus on the post-colonial era in which too many literary works were produced but the western orientalists and academics continued to consider them as worthless and worked to spread stereotypes until a wave of translations in the Arab literature took place. This paper shows how the orientalist notion that modern Arab literature is not a literature by itself but a social documentary, proved to be untrue through the remarkable translated texts which achieved repute and success inside as well as outside the Arab boundaries.

Taha1 Hussein (1889–1973) [Tāha Husayn] was the foremost writer, critic and pedagogue of the Arabic-speaking world in the early twentieth century. A leading Egyptian modernist and reformer, and a staunch supporter of world literature and international cultural cooperation, Hussein embodied both the ideals and the predilections of Arabic liberal modernism and Arab public intellectuals of his time. This essay was published in the first issue of Hussein’s magazine Al-kātib al-misri [The Egyptian Writer] in 1945 to outline the location of Arabic as world literature. Hussein argues that the longevity of Arabic literary history depends on a dual process of renovation and stability. Perhaps his most enduring legacy to modern critical thought, Hussein called to “renovate” literature, that is, to achieve balance between Arab classical history and the free, politically-independent spirit of the modern age, and between local and world cultures. According to Hussein this balance creates world literature. As such, world literature is a natural result of cultural exchange between nations – even if the exchange itself, as in the Islamic empire, the two World Wars or European colonisation, has been prompted by conflict.

Journal of World Literature

Trans. of Taha Hussein's essay "Contemplating the Past and Future of Arabic Literature", published 1945.

Tarek Shamma

Yaseen Noorani

During the late 19th century the Arabic public sphere in Egypt and the Levant and the Arab language began a process of rapid integration into the European-dominated world order of nations and national cultures. This process shaped public institutions and discourses homogeneous with those of European countries and a Modern Standard Arabic language made up of elements increasingly interchangeable with European equivalents. National consciousness, while emphasizing the distinctiveness of the Arabic language, at the same time worked to make Arabic the “equal” of its European counterparts in communicative tasks and capacities. A major factor in this process was the integration of the Arabic literary heritage into a world order of literature made up of universal literary genres and national literatures. The translation of contemporary European literary works played a central role in this process, but so did, in a different way, the translation of literary “classics,” such as those of ancient Greek literature. A celebrated instance of this phenomenon is Sulayman al-Bustani’s translation of the Iliad into Arabic which was published in Cairo in 1904. Unlike translations of modern fiction, drama, and poetry, the rendering of this ancient classic into Arabic had a limited scope in developing new means of linguistic expression in Arabic, or establishing new literary models. The publication of this translation was a momentous event in Arabic letters, and continues to be remembered as such, I argue, because of the enormous distance this project traversed in assimilating the Arabic literary heritage to world literature. The actual translation of the Homeric verses, an estimable achievement in itself, is only one portion of the massive undertaking al-Bustani took upon himself and on which he labored for 17 years. The poem is accompanied by an extensive introduction of nearly two hundred pages, copious explanatory notes that dwarf the poetic text, numerous illustrations, two indices, and three glossaries. The introduction and notes deal as much with the history, genres and lore of the Arabic literary heritage as they do with information necessary for understanding the ancient Greek poem. Al-Bustani’s effort in his scholarly disquisition is to uncover an Arabic literary history and generic framework that is parallel to and on an equivalent footing with those of European literatures -- and indeed, world literature in general. It is discovered that the epic (malḥama, al-Bustani’s term) is a genre to which Arabic has made significant contributions and that Arabic pre-Islamic or “jāhilī” poetry and legends occupy the same position in Arabic literary history as the “jāhilī” ancient Greek poetry and mythology do for European literatures. The translation of world literary classics into Arabic thus not only brings Arabic into line with other national languages that provide their citizens with access to these works, but reconfigures the Arabic literary heritage so that its works find their place in the literary world in which the Iliad occupies a central position. This reconfiguration, however, is not a clean break with the past, but a transformation of the meaning of existing categories that preserves their rootedness in the past. Al-Bustani’s Iliad project, therefore, is a prime instance of a literary translation that brings world literature into Arabic and at the same time brings Arabic into world literature on its own terms, or at least apparently so.

Rebecca Johnson

Taking as a case study the first known novel to be originally written in Arabic, Khalīl al-Khūrī’s Alas, I Am Not a Foreigner, this essay addresses the centrality of translation to the Arabic novel as it circulated in transnational Arabic print networks as part of both Arab enlightenment (nahḍa) discourse and material culture. Early original Arabic novels were serialized alongside translations, incorporated translated excerpts into their narratives, or were prefaced by comments that situated them in a literary marketplace dominated by translated fiction. This essay reads one such novel within larger debates surrounding the importation and use of foreign objects. By focusing on how translation enables texts to move, we see how these novels help engender transformations in form, how they create but also destabilize imagined communities, and how they provoke new assessments of literary, cultural, and commercial value. The novel is a special kind of import produced self-consciously thro...

magdi youssef

Whereas the acculturation and culture contact theories(1), which are so ‘popular’ in academic circles today, attempt to trace the mechanisms of the infiltration of an emitted cultural element (or of more than one) into another culture and society, mostly starting from a Western model as received in Non-Western, previously colonised countries, my theoretical proposition is to start from the receiving sociocultural context instead. However, I do not propose to reverse the hitherto prevailing hierarchy of cultural ‘maturity’ of the emitted cultural elements vs. ‘less mature’ receiving socio-cultures as suggested in said theories. This hierarchy might be best illustrated by the fact that Western literatures, or those written in Western languages, were considered identical to World literature during at least the last two centuries.

Mohamed-Salah Omri

Translation of Arabic Literature into English

Husam Issa Ramadan

This paper focuses on the general process of translating Arabic literature into English. It highlights the history of translation from and into Arabic and sheds light on the major reasons and watersheds that draw the Western translators and readers to the Arabic literary masterpieces on the one hand. On the other hand, it discusses the main impediments to increase the Arabic titles in English language translation.

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• Theses Canada Portal This link opens in a new window Index of Canadian masters theses and doctoral dissertations from 1965-present. Full text available from 1998 through August 31, 2002; those after 2002 may be available in Dissertations and Theses
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• Open Access Theses and Dissertations The number of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) openly available via institutional repositories has grown dramatically in recent years, increasing the need for a centralized service to search for this unique material. Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD), launched in early 2013, is on the path to fulfill that need. Not as large as the commercial subscription service ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Database, distinguishes itself by providing access to more than 1.6 million open-access theses and dissertations freely available from over 800 institutions worldwide. The simplified interface allows searching across all fields or, in advanced search, by specific field (Title, Author Name, Abstract, University/Publisher, or Subject/Keywords). In addition, users may limit searches to a specific language or date range. Search results may be sorted by relevance, author, university, or date more... less... Depending on the search, results may be further limited by date, university, department, degree, level (e.g., doctoral vs. master's), or language. The number of hits for entries under each limit is conveniently displayed in the left column. Links to the full text residing on the home institution's site are provided for each record. In many instances, several pages of the thesis or dissertation are available for viewing. Though other sites cover similar material, e.g., PQDT Open http://pqdtopen.proquest.com and Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, OATD focuses exclusively on open-access ETDs, and serves as an excellent resource for students and researchers. Its usefulness will continue to increase as more ETDs are made freely available
• Reviews of Dissertations on... Founded in 2010, Dissertation Reviews is a new site that features overviews of recently defended, unpublished doctoral dissertations in a wide variety of disciplines across the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our goal is to offer readers a glimpse of each discipline’s immediate present by focusing on the window of time between dissertation defense and first book publication.
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New Research Project, Dissertations, Thesis Topics in Arabic and Islamic Studies (July 2021)

If you are looking for good research project topics in Arabic and Islamic Studies we have compiled a list of some of the most recent, relevant research topics and complete works. You can browse through below to see if there are any that are suitable for your research work.

Arabic and Islamic Studies is an interdisciplinary field of study that offers a basic grounding in the Arabic language as well as the range of foundational documents, traditions, institutions and history of muslims in various countries and regions throughout the world.

We have curated some extensive project, thesis topics in Arabic and Islamic Studies for research purposes. This can be useful to any undergraduate or graduate student of Arabic and Islamic Studies looking to embark on their academic research work.

1. The Effectiveness of Islamic Education Subjects Among Moslem Students in Ranau, Sabah

2. African Muslim Diaspora: The Genesis of Contemporary Global Islamic Radicalism

3. The Impact Of Da’wah Activities On Muslim Youths; A Case Study Of Suru Local Government Area Of Kebbi State

4. The Contribution Of Hausa Or Fulani Scholars To The Development Of Islam In Ilorin Metropolis

5. The Activity Of Hisbah In Crime Control In Goronyo Local Government

6. Problems Of Fornication, Adultery And Alcoholism Among The Muslim Youth In Arewa Local Government Area Solution From Islamic Perspectives

7. Contributions OF Islamic Universities TO Professional Ethics: A Case Study of International Islamic University, Malaysia And Crescent University Abeokuta

8. Contributions of Islamic Scholars to Sustainable Human and Environmental Development: Islam Hadhari and Future Development of Muslim Countries

9. A Literary Review Of The Medieval Arabic Writings On Kanem – Borno

10. Religious Excerpts In West African Arabic Literature

11. Analysis Of The Literary Works Of Umar Krachie

12. Investigating The Decline Of Arabic Studies In Islamic Senior High Schools In The Kumasi Metropolis

13. Application And Practice Of The Principles Of Da‘Wah In The Age Of Globalisation

14. Effects of Modern Games on Muslim Youths: A Case Study of Gwandu Local Government Area of Kebbi State

15. Analysis of Judgements of Shari’ah Courts in Maiyama Local Government Area of Kebbi State

16. A Study of the Sufi Concept of Dhikr as Practiced by Muslims (A Case Study of Patigi Local Government Area, Kwara State)

17. The Effects of the Arab Conflicts on the Muslim World

You can check for more Project Topics in Arabic and Islamic Studies

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Arabic Language and Literature: Theses

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Are you looking for an engaging literary research paper topic? Whether you're writing a college-level essay or a master's thesis, the right literature research paper topics can make all the difference. They range from exploring particular genres or authors to examining the use of language in literary works. By researching these topics, you will gain a greater understanding of the ideas, improve your critical thinking skills, and learn to appreciate the nuances. This article will explore such literature topics for research and open up endless possibilities for analysis and interpretation, ranging from classic to modern-day texts. Are you ready to choose a trending topic and write a paper that will win your professor’s heart? 

What Are Literary Research Paper Topics?

Literary research paper topics focus on a particular literary work, such as a book, poem, novel, play, or story. They provide a great starting point for researching the specific aspect you're planning to explore for a better perception of the idea and help to eliminate any artificial facet. Literary research topics may analyze a single text, compare different writings by the same author, or contrast different authors' styles.  Common literature topics for research papers comprise symbolism, characterization, themes, plot structure, historical context, point-of-view analysis, biographical contexts, and intertextual connections. These research paper topics may also focus on how an author has been interpreted or evaluated over time, analyzing the critical reception of their works and examining any changes within literary canonization. Additionally, these topics can explore how literary works intersect with other disciplines, such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, politics, or economics.

Characteristics of Good Literature Research Paper Topics

Literary research paper topics are usually considered good when they are:

• Relevant They should be engaging, thought-provoking, and appropriate to the academic work.
• Specific Similarly, good literature research topics must have a narrow focus and not be overly broad.
• Interesting They should pique your interest and encourage you to explore and aspire to know more about the literary work.
• Challenging Deep analysis, thoughtful reflection, and creative thinking are also vital.
• Unique They should be memorable and offer new insights into academic work.

With these important characteristics of literary topics for research papers in mind, you're ready to start writing!

How to Choose a Literature Research Paper Topic?

Choosing a literature research paper topic can be daunting, but with careful thought and planning, you're sure to find the perfect one. In order to do this, you need to complete the following:

• Brainstorm: First, start by brainstorming topics that interest you. Think about the works you've been studying, authors and genres you enjoy reading, and themes that have resonated with you.
• Narrow it down: Once you've identified a few research topics that intrigue you, narrow them down to one that is most relevant and specific.
• Research: Explore if it is relevant. This will guarantee that you have enough material to work with.
• Refine: Once you have researched, refine your topic to ensure it is specific and engaging. Consider the most interesting aspects and how they can be explored further.
• Choose: Finally, choose the title that best reflects your interests and passions for an enjoyable research experience!

With these tips, you can find the perfect literary research paper topic! Don’t have time for reading piles of books? Get professional help with research paper writing from StudyCrumb and have your study completed by a real pro.

List of Literature Research Paper Topics

A list of literature topics for research offers a wide range of literary-related issues that can be explored and studied for your project. It includes ideas that could spark your creativity and help you choose the best title. Whether you're interested in exploring the works of Shakespeare or examining modern literature, this list of literary research paper topics has something for everyone!

• Use of symbolism in romantic poetry.
• Importance of technology within cyberpunk genres.
• Impact of fantasy on contemporary culture.
• Representation of male or female authors as represented by classic literary works.
• Postmodernist views of time and space in literature.
• Representation of race and ethnicity within contemporary fiction.
• Representation of LGBTQ characters in literary works.
• The role of mythology during the era of ancient works.
• Social media impact on modern texts.
• Classic and contemporary literary criticism.

Interesting Literary Research Paper Topics

If you are interested in classic books or modern trends, these ideas can be a fascinating starting point for your project. They include theories, criticism, comparison, and specific authors or genres. Besides providing an analysis of the work, a literary research paper topic could also comprise examining different themes. Explore the following interesting literature topics for your project:

• Literary influences of Jane Austen's works.
• Symbolism as represented by gothic texts.
• Relevance of classic mythology within contemporary fiction.
• The role of magic or fantasy in children's literature.
• The role of women in Victorian literature.
• Representation of race and ethnicity in early 20th-century literature.
• Themes of love and loss in romantic poetry.
• The use of horror genres in contemporary fiction.
• Postcolonialism's impact on literary works.
• Nature in 19th-century literature .
• Representation of LGBTQ characters as represented by contemporary fiction.
• Technology's impact on modern literary works.
• Classic and contemporary interpretations of gothic texts.
• The role of magic and fantasy in modern literary works.
• Representation of death and loss in 20th-century works.

Great Literature Research Paper Topics

A list of great literature research topics provides a variety of ideas related to literary works. These research topics in literature can offer an exciting starting point for your English paper:

• Rebellion themes in Shakespeare's tragedies.
• Class and economic status in Victorian texts.
• Symbolism in romantic poetry.
• Impact of British imperialism on literary fiction worldwide.
• Gender and sexuality representation in early 20th-century writings.
• Postcolonialism in 19th-century fiction.
• The literary influence of WWII on modern writings.
• Vampires' role in gothic literary texts.
• Use of fantasy in childhood writings.
• Technology's impact on contemporary literary works.
• Race and ethnicity as represented by postmodern fiction.
• Religion in romantic poetry.
• Themes of love and loss in 20th-century texts.
• Horror genres in literary fiction.
• Postmodernism's impact on contemporary literary works.

Unique Literature Research Paper Topics

Unique literature topics for research papers can help students explore new concepts and gain a deeper understanding of their subject. Below are rare literature paper topics for you to review:

• The role of jealousy in 17th-century literary works.
• Gender identity as represented by reformist fiction.
• Mythological figures as portrayed by Greek and Roman poetry.
• The relationship between gender and power in Shakespeare's plays.
• Themes of isolation in 20th-century British poetry.
• Metaphors in the works of Gabriel García Márquez .
• Themes of rebellion and revolution in African American literary texts.
• The role of women in medieval romance literature.
• Poverty representation in Victorian novels.
• Themes of oppression and freedom in colonial Latin American texts.
• Use of metaphor and allegory in Dante's divine comedy.
• Influence of industrialization on 19th-century fiction.
• Dystopian settings within modern literature.
• Religion in contemporary fiction.

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Controversial Literary Research Paper Topics

Controversial literary research topics can provide students with an opportunity to explore complex and sometimes contentious issues related to literary texts. Find below a controversial literary research paper topic for your dream English project!

• Racial stereotypes during 19th-century English literature.
• Themes of sexuality and desire in ancient Greek poetry.
• The relationship between political power and language in Shakespeare's plays.
• Conflict representation during 20th-century English fiction.
• English role in colonial Indian literature.
• Gender and racial representations within African American autobiographies.
• Themes of justice and control in Victorian English novels.
• Themes of oppression and resistance in feminist texts.
• The role of English in modern Japanese fiction.
• Themes of identity and belonging in postcolonial Indian literature.
• Censorship, free speech, and social responsibility in 19th-century English novels.
• Politics and power representations in Latin American poetry.
• Gender, race, and class representations in English renaissance drama.
• English as a tool for political ideology within the works of George Orwell.
• Language used to defy authority during modern fiction writing.

Fresh Literature Research Paper Ideas

Coming up with fresh ideas for literature research topics can be daunting. Students may want to look at the works they have studied or venture outside the traditional reading list and explore different authors and genres. Some literature research paper ideas comprise studying how certain authors influenced the literary movement, analyzing how language has been used throughout history, or examining gender, race, and class representations from a literary text. Here is a perfect list of fresh ideas!

• Aesthetics as presented by postmodern fiction.
• The theme of loss as portrayed by African authors .
• Use of language throughout history.
• Identity and belonging representation in contemporary young adult fiction.
• The intersection between art and literature in modern poetry.
• Themes of authority, rebellion, and revolution in medieval epic poetry.
• Role of fantasy in horror fiction.
• Gender, race, and class representations within British romanticism.
• American literary realism and naturalism.
• Influence of symbolism on French modernist poetry.
• Construction of memory within African American autobiographies.
• Representation of narrative time in Latin American fiction.
• Social injustice theme during early 20th-century American drama.
• The relationship between social identity and language during postcolonial fiction.
• Values and beliefs representations as presented by ancient Greek mythology.

Literature Research Paper Topics for Students

For students looking for research topics in literature for study, there is a wide variety of options available. Depending on the level and course, they might focus on analyzing particular authors, literary movements, or genres, exploring the use of language throughout history, or examining representations of gender, race, and class in books. You also need to study literary devices and their effects on readers when exploring literary topics for a research paper . Below are examples of literature topics for different students:

Literature Research Paper Topics for High School

These are literature topics to research, specifically tailored to high school students. They involve exploring the influence of literary work on culture, analyzing a single author's literary movement or genre, or investigating language use throughout history. This list of research topics in literature for high school provides an original starting point for your literary project!

• Racism as presented during early 20th-century works.
• Social criticism within contemporary dystopian young adult fiction.
• Folklore's impact on contemporary poetry.
• Representation of nature in modern literature.
• Spirituality as portrayed by reformist literature.
• Social class representation within postmodern novels.
• The theme of environment in romantic works.
• Colonialism representation during postcolonial works.
• Effects of pop culture on modern fiction.
• Mental illness representation during 19th-century poetry.
• The role of music and art in early 20th-century literary texts.
• Literature's influence on identity building in minority cultures.
• Family dynamics in postmodern poetry.
• Family and community representations during gothic fiction.
• Literature as a tool for social change.

Literature Research Paper Topics for College Students

These titles entail more serious and in-depth scrutiny than a high school literary paper. A college-level literary research paper topic provides students with a broader range of analysis. It encompasses looking at literature as a form of political commentary to get its relationship with other art forms. Below are literature research paper topics for college students:

• Identity construction during postmodern poetry.
• Alienation themes within modern fiction.
• Gender role representations in Shakespearean tragedies.
• The relationship between narrative and memory within Holocaust literature.
• Nature's role in contemporary American fiction.
• Authority and subversion themes during the early 20th-century drama.
• Race, class, and gender representation within African American autobiographies.
• Social media influence the literary language.
• The relationship between social identity and language in postcolonial fiction.
• Values as presented by ancient Greek mythology .
• Psychological distress during 20th-century war narratives.
• Attitudes towards mental illness as portrayed by gothic texts.
• The relationship between science and literary imagination.
• Social hierarchy within Victorian novels.
• Religion's role in southern American literature.

Literary Research Paper Topics by Categories

Research paper topics for literature by category offer an exclusive and stimulating perspective on literary analysis worldwide. They can be grouped into literary movements, authors, and genres, as well as topics related to language and history. If you are interested in European, American, and English literature topics, these ideas will help you find the perfect literary research paper topic for your project.

World Literature Research Paper Topics

Research paper topics for world literature allow students to explore literary works from any part of the world, including texts written in English, Spanish, and other languages. Below is a list that provides original world literature research topics for any project:

• Impact of colonialism on native literary traditions.
• Gender representation within French literature.
• Religion's role within literary works from Latin America.
• Symbolism in English poetry from the 19th century.
• Themes of nationalism within modern Russian fiction.
• Power and politics in Spanish plays.
• Conflict as portrayed by African literature.
• The role of folklore within Chinese fiction.
• Themes of cultural identity in Japanese drama.
• Family ties in Italian poetry.
• Symbolism in Arabic literature.
• Social class representation in Indian novels.
• Impact of globalization on middle eastern fiction.
• Human rights themes by contemporary Australian poets.
• Western representations of other cultures in modern literature.

American Literature Research Paper Topics

In research paper topics for American literature, you examine the works of early American writers and poets, as well as those from later periods. Here is a list of American literature topics for your paper!

• Attitudes towards race in early American novels.
• Colonialism during 19th-century poetry.
• Freedom and rebellion themes within revolutionary literature.
• The emergence of gothic horror in American fiction.
• Impact of transcendentalism on American writing.
• Gender representation during pre-civil war literature .
• Themes of morality in post-World War II American fiction.
• Role of religion during 19th-century American novels.
• Slavery and its abolition by American poets.
• Social class representation during early American drama.
• Themes of identity in postmodern American fiction.
• Industrialization of 20th-century literature.
• War and conflict representation by contemporary American playwrights.
• Racism in 20th-century American novels.
• Assimilation and immigration themes in post-World War II American literature.

British Literature Research Paper Topics

In British literature research topics, you explore works from early British writers to contemporary authors. Ideally, research topics for British literature should encompass works written by authors from all eras, including Medieval, Renaissance, and modern. Here is a list of English literature research paper topics for your perfect essay!

• Gender representation during medieval English literature.
• Colonialism's effects on British literary works during the 18th century.
• Influence of British writers on modern literature.
• The role of nature in 18th-century British novels.
• Interpretations of classic British literary works.
• Social class representations during 19th-century British fiction.
• Themes of love and romance within Victorian literature.
• Industrialization's impact on 20th-century British novels.
• Patriotism and nationalism during post-World War II literary work.
• Multiculturalism representations in postmodern British fiction.
• Effects of censorship on British authors during the 20th century.
• Mental health representation in modern British poetry.
• Representation of historical events in British works throughout time.
• Technological representations in 21st-century British Novels.
• Intersectionality by contemporary British playwrights.

Did you know that you can generate a bunch of title ideas using our Research Paper Topic Generator ?

European Literary Research Paper Topics

European literature research paper topics offer an excellent opportunity to explore the works of European authors. They allow you to study and analyze the academic traditions and cultures of some of Europe's most influential writers. You can find such literary research paper topic ideas in the list below:

• Representations of the European monarchy in classic novels.
• Censorship effects on European authors during the 20th century.
• Impact of World War II on European authors.
• Gender representations within Victorian poetry.
• Literary works from different countries and cultures in Europe.
• Use of language, symbolism, and imagery to explore themes in European texts.
• Themes of nature and environment within German short stories.
• Technology representations in late Victorian poetry.
• Popular culture's influence on European literary movements from the 20th century to modern times.
• Impact of European literary works on people's perceptions of other cultures.
• Use of supernatural elements within European gothic writings from the 18th to 19th centuries.
• Identity representations in French social realism texts.
• Technology's impact on contemporary European literary works.
• Family and community representations during post-war theater.
• Themes of justice and injustice within European dystopian texts.

Literature Research Paper Ideas by Periods

You may aspire to find literature topics for research papers from different historical periods. This involves studying literature from various cultures or eras, such as ancient, medieval, or modern ones. These ideas also cover the examination of themes and symbols used in writings and scrutinizing characters and their development through various works. Other topics include the exploration of texts from a political perspective in relation to their historical contexts. These ideas contain some literary research topics from various periods:

Ancient Literary Research Paper Topics

There are many exciting options to consider if you're looking for ancient literature research paper topics. They can be studied with regard to history, culture, art, and philosophy. To gain more insight, you could explore the works of Homer, Henry James, Virgil, and the Mahabharata, or old Egyptian writings, such as The Iliad and Odyssey . Below is a list of ancient literature topics for research you can choose from.

• Gender representations in epic poetry.
• Role of mythology and religion in ancient texts.
• Influence of philosophy on ancient literature.
• Power representations in Greek tragedy.
• Heroism by early epic authors.
• Love and marriage in ancient texts.
• Ancient narratives of war and conflict.
• Slavery representations in Roman poetry.
• The role of music and art in classical literature.
• Nature representations in ancient texts.
• Politics' influence on Greek comedy.
• Family and community representations in roman narratives.
• Characters' representation in epic poetry.
• The role of technology in early literary works.
• Representations of the divine in ancient texts.

Read more: History Research Topics for Students 

Medieval Literature Research Paper Topics

The medieval literary study provides a unique opportunity to explore literature research topics of the Middle Ages. From Beowulf to The Canterbury Tales , these works offer insights into this era's cultural beliefs and values. Here are such literary topics for research papers to focus on:

• Representations of medieval chivalry in literary works.
• Religion's influence on medieval works.
• Gender representation in medieval texts.
• The role of magic in medieval narratives.
• The impact of feudalism on medieval texts.
• Honor and loyalty representations by chivalric texts.
• The role of courtly love in medieval works.
• Knights and warriors' representations in literary works.
• Warfare representations in medieval texts.
• The role of education and learning in medieval literature.

Renaissance Literary Research Paper Topics

The Renaissance literature research paper ideas explore works of literature during the Renaissance era, which spanned from the 14th to the 17th century. They focus on the themes, authors, and literature of this period to provide a better understanding of how literary works have evolved within this timeframe and their impact on our current literature. Some of the most influential figures who contributed immensely to writings during this era were William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes. If you are interested in researching this period, you can consider a literature research paper topic from the list below:

• Love and romance representations in Renaissance texts.
• Science and technology in 16th-century literature.
• Class and social status representations in Renaissance literary works.
• Classical mythology in Renaissance poetry.
• Representations of family and community in Renaissance narratives.
• Effects of humanism on Renaissance literature in Europe.
• Imagery role by William Shakespeare .
• Representations of art, music, and theater in Renaissance texts.
• Politics' role in 16th-century literary texts.
• Nature representation by John Milton or Torquato Tasso.
• Exploration influence on Renaissance narratives.
• Influence of Renaissance literature on modern writing.
• Women's representation in literary texts by Anne Bradstreet or Aphra Behn.
• Magic and supernatural representations in literary works of Renaissance.
• Humanism and individualism themes within Renaissance literature.

Romantic Literature Research Paper Ideas

Romantic literature emerged during the late 18th century and flourished throughout the early 19th century in Europe. It is characterized by its focus on emotion and depictions of nature. This movement had a lasting impact on literary works and has been highly influential. Research topics in literature can explore the writings of authors such as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth. Here are some ideas related to romanticism:

• Nature representations in Romantic texts.
• The role of emotion as depicted in 19th-century literature.
• Influence of Romantic authors on modern literature and culture.
• Women's representation in Romantic narratives.
• Industrialization impact on 19th-century texts.
• Influence of religion and superstition in early Romantic texts.
• Use of technology to discuss themes in Romantic texts from the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
• The role of education as portrayed by Romantic narratives.
• Character analysis and plot structure in gothic fiction.
• Nationalism and patriotism as represented by post-Napoleonic war poems.

Modernist Literary Research Paper Topics

Modern literature emerged during the early 20th century until the end of World War II. It is characterized by a rejection of traditional conventions and focused on experimentation with form. This movement had an unprecedented impact on literature research topics and is highly influential today. If you are looking for literary topics for research papers that focus on modernism, consider exploring the following:

• Nature representations by modern texts.
• Social inequality in 21st-century novels.
• Modernism's influence on current literature and culture.
• Climate change within contemporary fiction.
• Impact of social injustice on 20th-century literary works.
• Urbanization representations by modern literary texts.
• Education's influence on modernist narratives.
• Wealth and power in early modernist texts.
• Themes of urban life by Ezra Pound or Wallace Stevens.
• Modernism's impact on classical literature.
• Globalization themes within postmodern poetry.
• Multiculturalism themes in contemporary literary works.
• Mental health representations in modern British novels.
• Global conflict representation in modern fiction.
• The influence of psychoanalysis on modernist literature.

Current Literature Research Paper Ideas

Current literature paper topics can look at the latest trends. They include exploring contemporary works such as Harry Potter by J.K Rowling and Stardust by Neil Gaiman. These topics may also involve analyzing social media's effects on literary writings. If you are looking for current literary topics for a research paper, consider the following:

• Technological impact on literary works in the 21st century.
• Art, music, and theater in modern texts.
• Impact of conflict on recent literary works.
• Social injustice in 21st-century narratives.
• Racism, ethnicity, and slavery in contemporary texts.
• Wealth and power in recent literary works.
• Globalization themes in postmodern poetry.
• Urbanization in modern writings.
• Immigration within postmodern British novels.

In case you need more paper topics, feel free to browse our blog. We have a wide arsenal of ideas starting from philosophy research paper topics to education research paper topics .  

Bottom Line on Literature Research Paper Topics

Literature topics for research can explore a wide range of themes and works. Whether you are looking for visionary ideas about poetry, fiction, or books from different eras, there is no shortage of literature paper topics to choose from. To narrow down your focus and find the best idea for your project, consider researching literary movements, reading widely, and thinking about the areas that interest you most.  Literature topics for research papers should be chosen based on students' interests and areas of expertise. By conducting in-depth research, you will gain a greater appreciation for literary work and its impact on society. With this article as a guide, you can take the time to find a topic that speaks to you and create an engaging research paper.

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