Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Curated Thematic Corpora: A Critical Survey, Bibliometric Evidence, and the ThemePath-RAG Framework
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external evidence, but many RAG systems represent knowledge either as flat text chunks or as automatically constructed indexing graphs. This assumption is incomplete for curated thematic corpora, including religious scriptures, legal codes, clinical guidelines, educational taxonomies, policy documents, and library classification systems, where domain experts have already organized knowledge into thematic paths and citeable canonical units. This paper investigates how RAG can exploit such expert-authored structures while pruning evidence to a compact and query-specific set. We conduct a critical survey supported by a bibliometric analysis of 2815 Scopus-indexed RAG-related records exported on 26 May 2026, of which 2809 records were retained after duplicate removal. The bibliometric results indicate rapid growth in RAG research but limited explicit consolidation around curated thematic paths, canonical evidence units, or thematic path-guided evidence pruning. We therefore propose ThemePath-RAG, a retrieval framework that retrieves curated thematic paths as high-recall semantic routes, expands candidate canonical evidence, and applies query-aware scoring and global pruning before generation. To assess operational feasibility, we implement ThemePath-RAG for Qur’anic question answering and compare it with a Vector RAG baseline on 150 paired questions using RAGAS context relevance with gpt-4o-mini as the LLM evaluator. Both methods return approximately three final ayat per question. Vector RAG achieves higher mean context relevance than ThemePath-RAG (0.920 versus 0.798; p<0.001). Thus, the proof of concept establishes the feasibility of thematic-path-guided retrieval and identifies evidence-selection challenges, rather than demonstrating superiority over conventional vector retrieval. The paper clarifies the framework’s relationship to GraphRAG, LightRAG, HippoRAG, PathRAG, ontology-based RAG, and AI-augmented bibliometric systems, and outlines a language-matched, multi-baseline evaluation agenda for future cross-domain validation.