SACRED TEXT DISPOSAL AND SUSTAINABLE WASTE MANAGEMENT: MAPPING THE GLOBAL RESEARCH LANDSCAPE THROUGH BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35631/IJMOE.832008Keywords:
Disposal, Management, Sacred TextAbstract
The disposal of sacred texts presents a distinctive sustainability challenge because environmentally responsible waste-management practices must be reconciled with religious prescriptions, cultural sensitivities, and the preservation of textual sanctity. Despite growing scholarly attention to sustainable waste management and religion–environment interactions, the intellectual structure, research development, and collaborative landscape surrounding sacred-text disposal remain insufficiently understood. This study therefore provides a bibliometric analysis of the global literature on sacred text disposal and sustainable waste management, identifying publication trends, influential contributors, geographical patterns, thematic structures, and international research collaboration. Bibliographic records were retrieved from the Scopus database using an advanced search strategy structured around three principal concepts: sacred text, disposal, and management, incorporating relevant synonymous and related terms. Following data screening and cleaning using Scopus Analyzer and OpenRefine, 262 publications spanning 1973 to August 2026 were retained for analysis. VOSviewer was subsequently employed to conduct keyword co-occurrence and country-level co-authorship network analyses. The findings reveal substantial recent growth in the field, with 138 publications (52.67%) appearing between 2019 and August 2026, and annual output reaching its highest level in 2025, at 29 publications (11.07%). Geographically, the United States was the leading contributor with 66 publications (25.19%), followed by the United Kingdom (25; 9.54%), Indonesia (23; 8.78%), and Malaysia (18; 6.87%). Keyword mapping revealed a heterogeneous intellectual structure connecting religion and sacred-text scholarship with human-centered, computational, historical, and environmental research, while country co-authorship patterns indicated uneven international collaboration. Overall, the findings characterize sacred-text disposal and sustainable waste management as an emerging, interdisciplinary, yet conceptually fragmented research domain. Greater integration of religious principles, waste-management technologies, circular-economy strategies, and cross-country collaboration is required to develop sustainable disposal frameworks that simultaneously safeguard environmental objectives and the religious sanctity of sacred materials.
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