Quranic studies is the academic study of the Quran, the central religious text of Islam. Like in biblical studies, the field uses and applies a diverse set of disciplines and methods, such as philology, textual criticism, lexicography, codicology, literary criticism, comparative religion, and historical criticism. The beginning of modern Quranic studies began among German scholars from the 19th century.

Quranic studies has three primary goals. The first goal is to understand the original meaning, sources, history of revelation, and the history of the recording and transmission, of the Quran. The second is to trace how the Quran was received by people, including how it was understood and interpreted (exegesis), throughout the centuries. The third is a study and appreciation of the Quran as literature independently of the other two goals. (See also: Corpus Coranicum)

Quranic studies employs the historical-critical method (HCM) as its primary methodological apparatus. The HCM is an approach that "delays any assessment of scripture's truth and relevance until after the act of interpretation has been carried out". A common misconception about the term "critical" is that it implies criticizing a text. Instead, in the HCM, to read a text critically means:

to suspend inherited presuppositions about its origin, transmission, and meaning, and to assess their adequacy in the light of a close reading of that text itself as well as other relevant sources ... This is not to say that scripture should conversely be assumed to be false and mortal, but it does open up the very real possibility that an interpreter may find scripture to contain statements that are, by his own standards, false, inconsistent, or trivial. Hence, a fully critical approach to the Bible, or to the Qur’an for that matter, is equivalent to the demand, frequently reiterated by Biblical scholars from the eighteenth century onwards, that the Bible is to be interpreted in the same manner as any other text.

By contrast, to read a text historically would mean to:

require the meanings ascribed to it to have been humanly ‘thinkable’ or ‘sayable’ within the text's original historical environment, as far as the latter can be retrospectively reconstructed. At least for the mainstream of historical-critical scholarship, the notion of possibility underlying the words ‘thinkable’ and ‘sayable’ is informed by the principle of historical analogy – the assumption that past periods of history were constrained by the same natural laws as the present age, that the moral and intellectual abilities of human agents in the past were not radically different from ours, and that the behaviour of past agents, like that of contemporary ones, is at least partly explicable by recourse to certain social and economic factors.

Today, the field of applying the methods of textual criticism to the Quran is still in its infancy. The most significant development in recent years has been the digitization of early Quran manuscripts. In the same timeframe, the study of Quran manuscripts has also picked up.

When Muhammad, the authoritative source of divine revelation among his followers (known as his Companions) died, it became necessary for the Companions to collect his teachings into a single authoritative document so that they would not be lost. Collections of his teachings were written down into codices, a type of document that is the ancestor of the modern book. The unit of division of these Quran codices was the surah, which is roughly equivalent to a chapter in a book today. The most important collection was the Uthmanic codex, which received its name due to it being canonized during the reign of the caliph Uthman around 650 AD, at which point it became the authoritative written codification of the Quran in Islam. Before this event, other Companions of Muhammad had also created their own, slightly different codices of the Quran. In Islamic history, codices have been attributed to Abdullah ibn Masud, Ubayy ibn Ka'b, and Abu Musa al-Ash'ari.