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The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a pilot study conducted in Pakistan, about the barriers perceived by users and non‐users of Islamic banking when selecting Islamic banks.

This study was conducted to include two types of banking customers, users (customers of Islamic banks only and, Islamic and conventional banks both) and non‐users (customers of conventional banks only). The qualitative research included in‐depth interviews with managers of Islamic banks and two focus groups with users and non‐users, respectively. The survey questionnaire that was subsequently designed received 109 responses. The analysis includes hypothesis testing, factor analysis, and cluster analysis.

A narrow branch network, inconvenient branch locations and perception that “Islamic banks do not completely follow Islamic principles” acted as barriers for non‐users when selecting Islamic banks. Further, “a religious ruling against Islamic banks” was not considered an important barrier when selecting Islamic banks.

This research outlines an alternative methodology of looking at bank selection criteria, by measuring the other side of the coin, i.e. the barriers perceived by users and non‐users of Islamic banking when selecting Islamic banks. Compared to the prevailing literature on the subject, such an approach is enlightening and can have enormous potential as it directly measures the perceived barriers towards Islamic banking. Furthermore, this pilot study is also an important contribution to the limited literature on consumer attitudes towards Islamic banking in Pakistan, where the operations of Islamic banks are still in their formative stage.

Assessing the research performance of researchers offers inducement toward excellence in research. This study aims to analyze the research productivity of the most prolific authors of Pakistan considering their trends toward publications, citations and collaboration.

Top 100 authors from the top 10 Pakistani universities from Web of Science over the 10 years with the rigorous data cleaning process were selected. Scientometric analysis techniques were carried out to evaluate the research profile of these authors.

The findings revealed that majority of the productive authors were male working in the position of Professor in the physical sciences area. The publications and citations gradually increase with time. They preferred to collaborate for their publications, while first authorship publications were found less in number. Moreover, the propensity to collaborate at the international level increases double-fold from the first five years to the next five years period. In addition, the position of the authors was explored among different performance metrics. The finding exhibits variation in the ranking of authors among them. The impact of numbers of authors, funding status, publication of articles, presence of collaboration and international collaboration on the dependent variable and citation count was insignificant. However, the publication of review papers has a significant impact on the citation counts.

Findings have significant implications for policymakers to make maximum opportunities for researchers to strengthen linkages for collaboration and increase the funding prospects.

Studies on this topic are scarce, and therefore, this study provides useful recommendations to researchers and institutes to improve research productivity.