Atla Religion Database Tutorial

Atla Religion Database Tutorial

How to use key features of Atla Religion Database with AtlaSerials PLUS, the premier database for theology and religious studies

This tutorial demonstrates four key ways of searching:

1. A basic keyword search
2. A scripture citation or exact passage search
3. A scripture range search
4. A subject heading search

This video demonstrates how to use key features of Atla Religion Database with AtlaSerials PLUS.

Atla Religion Database is the premier database for theology and religious studies and is the most frequently used database at Princeton Theological Seminary. It includes over 3.4 million records, including full-text access to articles from 670 journals.

You can see a list of all journals indexed in this database by clicking on Publications.

This list also shows the date range and whether full-text access is available in Atla.

Atla Religion Database is an EBSCO database, and it allows for aggregate searching. That means that you can select multiple databases to search simultaneously.

This is a useful feature for basic searching. However, aggregate searching is not compatible with the more specialized search features that are available when searching Atla Religion Database on its own, so I will not run an aggregate search in this video.

Atla Religion Database has many features that allow for precise scriptural searching, so let’s look at a few ways that we can search for articles about a Biblical passage.

First, I’m going to do a basic search. I want to find articles about Luke 18:9-14, the parable of the pharisee and the tax collector.

Before I run my search, there are some pre-search modifiers that I can select.

Over here, there’s an option to select full text. However, I recommend not doing this, because Wright Library has access to many journal articles in print that are not available online. However, I do recommend selecting “scholarly (peer reviewed) journals” over here.

For articles published within a particular date range, you can also set that timespan here.

I’m going to leave the dates blank for now and run my search.

Here are my search results.

Skimming through the titles, I can see that all of the results mention the Biblical passage that I searched for.

However, we can also see that I only have 12 results, which seems like a low number for a widely discussed Biblical parable.

Clicking on one of these articles can help me find ways to run a more comprehensive search for articles about this passage.

This article showed up in my basic search because the title includes my search term “Luke 18:9-14".

We can also see that this article has been indexed with the scripture citation Luke 18:9 – 18:14.

Notice that the format of the scripture citation is a little bit different from my original search term, even though both refer to the same passage.

By clicking on the scripture citation link, I can run a new search.

We can see my new search term here in the search bar.

In Atla Religion Database, the code “ZP” stands for “exact passage.” I now have 60 results that are about the passage Luke 18:9-14.

Some of these results are the same ones as before, but I also have many new results, such as this article by Amy-Jill Levine.

Levine’s article is about parable of the pharisee and the tax collector, but because she doesn’t use the words “Luke 18:9-14" in the title of her article, it didn’t show up when I did my initial search. Doing a scripture citation search is an excellent way to ensure that you find all articles about a particular biblical passage.

We ran this scripture citation search by doing a basic keyword search, opening one of the results, and then clicking on scripture citation. You can also do a scripture citation search directly by going to More and clicking on Indexes.

Atla Religion Database has several indexes that are customized to theology and religious studies, such as Babylonian Talmud Citation, Mishnah Citation, and Quran Citation. We are going to choose Bible Citation.

Because I didn’t format my citation the same way as the database does, it says that no results were found.

However, I can scroll down to manually select the relevant passages.

This page shows results for Luke 19, so I’m going to click on “previous” to get back to Luke 18.

Here is the passage that I’m looking for, and we can see that clicking on it will give me the same 60 results as I got when I did the scripture citation search before.

If I’m interested in the broader context of this passage, I might also want to add some of these other options, for Luke 18:9-23, 18:9-24, and so on.

I will select all the passages that I want and then scroll up to add them to my search and run the search.

We can see from the search bar that I have done another exact passage search for articles about any of these three passages.

I can also search for biblical passages by doing a scripture range search. To run this type of search, go to the scriptures tab at the top of the database page.

Here are the books of the Bible arranged in canonical order, so I will click through until I get to Luke.

Then click expand to see all of the chapters in this book.

Clicking expand again will give me all of the verses.

The passage that I’m interested in starts at verse 9, so I will select that.

I now have 231 results.

It might seem surprising that I have more results when doing a scripture range search for a single verse than when I did the scripture citation search for a longer passage.

Looking at the scripture citations for some of my results will show why.

The scripture citation for this article shows that it is about several chapters of Luke.

Verse 18:9 falls within the range of chapters that this article is about, but it is unlikely that this article focuses on this particular verse. Doing a scripture range search is therefore useful if you’re looking for work about the broader context of a passage, but if you want to focus on a specific passage, it is best to do an exact passage or scripture citation search.

The last way to search for biblical passages is by subject heading. The subject headings used in Atla Religion Database are listed under the Thesaurus tab.

The subject headings aren’t formatted as biblical chapters and verses – that's what the scripture citation heading is for – so instead I will search for the name of the parable in Luke 18:9-14. This parable has several names, so I’ll try searching for “pharisee and tax collector” and see what shows up.

The search results tell me that “pharisee and tax collector” isn’t a standardized subject heading in Atla Religion Database, so instead I should use the subject heading “pharisee and the publican (Parable).”

I will add that term and run a search.

I get many of the same results as before, but I also get this sermon, which I didn’t see before because it hasn't been indexed with a scripture citation. If you want comprehensive results, it is useful to search in multiple ways to ensure that you don’t miss results that have limited metadata. Like with the scripture citation search, you can either construct the search yourself, or you can run a basic search and then click on the relevant subject headings in the results.

Finally, let’s look at how to refine your results after running any of the searches discussed in this video. When I did my subject heading search, I lost some of the filters that I had selected when I did my initial basic search, so I can select peer-reviewed journals again now.

I can set my publication range, and if I were interested in publications from a specific journal, I could select that publication here.

I can also filter by language. I have a few Italian results, so since I don’t read Italian, I might want to limit my search to languages that I know.

I have now targeted my search to focus on scholarly publications in English from the last ten years.

In this video we have covered four key ways of searching Atla Religion Database with Atla Serials PLUS.

1. A basic keyword search, which is useful for starting your research but will not give comprehensive results.
2. A scripture citation or exact passage search, which will provide all articles about a specific biblical passage, assuming that they have been indexed with a scripture citation tag.
3. A scripture range search, which is useful for seeing the broader context of a passage but is not as targeted as the exact passage search.
4. And a subject heading search, which will provide all articles about a specific topic.

Hopefully this video will help you navigate Atla Religion Database with Atla Serials PLUS. If you have any questions about using this database, please don’t hesitate to contact the Reference Librarian.

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