Source Recognition's Achievements of Narrative Works for Other Fields of Hadith Studies

Sources recognition of narrative works, which is one of the new areas of hadith studies, is dedicated to identifying existing or missing sources of accessible narrative works. If the researches in this field are done methodically and systematically in a precise method, it would obtain a comprehensive process that, in addition to results such as finding direct and indirect sources of narrative work, the possible amount of benefit from a source, the belonging of the sources to hadith periods, and the degree of benefit from the early and later narrative works, has many other beneficial achievements for other areas of hadith studies. This research introduces twelve important and diverse achievements based on the review and analysis of the studies that have been conducted so far in the field of recognizing sources of narrative works, while exemplifying such studies. These achievements include dating hadiths, reconstructing lost works, finding methods of early hadith scholars in obtaining narrations from hadith works, correcting sanad, completing chains of transmitters in the lists (fihrist), gathering more detailed information about narrative works, identifying the methods trusted by hadith scholars in frequent sanads, knowing how the hadith schools interact with each other, finding more evidence in the written sources of narrative works, identifying cases of oral transmission, achieving new findings as a result of statistical analysis, and identifying the transmission course of hadith science among scholars.