Twenty-Five Years of Hajj–Umrah Research (2001–2025): A Global Bibliometric and Science-Mapping Overview

Abstract

Hajj–Umrah research spans public health, infectious disease, heat and climate, crowd safety, chronic disease, digital health, rehabilitation, and women’s health, yet its overall evolution has not been systematically mapped. This study aimed to quantify output and collaboration, describe thematic evolution,
and identify 2020–2025 hot topics that can inform practice, policy, and curricula. We analysed a document set exported from Scopus using TITLE(Hajj OR Umrah) for 2001–2025 (articles, reviews, proceedings), de-duplicated, and processed with Bibliometrix (R) and VOSviewer (keyword co-occurrence, thematic
mapping, three-period evolution). A simple trend metric compared keyword frequencies in 2020–2025 vs 2001–2019. The corpus comprises 1,000 documents, with steady growth across five-year windows (38, 81, 185, 331, 365 documents). The latest window contributes the largest volume but shows a slight negative
compound annual growth rate for 2021–2025, consistent with post-COVID normalization and partial 2025 indexing; sensitivity restricted to 2020–2024 yields 367 documents with positive growth of about 4.4%. Thematically, the field has recently pivoted toward COVID-19–related work and AI-enabled analytic
approaches, including advanced machine-learning and diagnostic studies, while maintaining strong attention to infectious, heat, and crowd-related risks. In contrast, themes relating to rehabilitation and the International Classification of Functioning, functional readiness and frailty, and women’s health remain
small and comparatively under-represented. These patterns highlight priority agendas for climate-ready operations and heat-risk mitigation, rigorously validated and interoperable analytic or digital tools, and functional-readiness pathways that explicitly integrate frailty, ICF concepts, and women’s-health
perspectives into Hajj–Umrah health services and management.