Religion Database Tutorial

Religion Database Tutorial

This video demonstrates how to search Religion Database. Although this database is not as extensive as Atla Religion Database with AtlaSerials PLUS, it does contain some journals not available in Atla.

This video demonstrates how to search Religion Database. Although this database is not as extensive as Atla Religion Database, it does contain some journals that aren’t available in Atla, so I often recommend searching it after doing an initial search of Atla.

If you want to check if a particular journal is available in Religion Database, you can search for a title in Publications.

You can see the date ranges for full-text access and indexing for each journal, plus information about the journal’s ranking and impact.

Note that the coverage of the database as a whole goes back to 1986, but some publications will only have more recent coverage.

I want to find articles about the theologian Georges Florovsky. I’ll start by doing a basic search of his name. Before running my search, I can select if I want to limit my search to full-text PDFs or to peer-reviewed articles. I will select the “peer reviewed” box because I am looking for scholarly sources, but I will leave full-text blank because I might be able to find a copy of the article at the library even if Religion Database doesn’t have the full text online.

I’m now going to run my search.

Here are my search results. Because I was searching for someone’s name, the database suggests that I might be interested in works written by Georges Florovsky. However, I am looking for articles about him, so I will ignore that suggestion.

Looking through the results, I notice some book reviews.

I am looking for articles, not reviews, so I can use the filters on the left to refine my results. Clicking on “more” under “document type” gives me options to include and exclude different types of writing.

If I want to see the major subjects covered in these articles, I can use the subject filter to see a list of relevant subjects and select any that are pertinent to my research.

These subjects can be very broad, like “Christianity” and “theology,” but the results lower on the list (which have fewer articles associated with them) are often more specific and more useful.

I’ve now searched for scholarly journal articles about Georges Florovsky and ecumenism.

Religion Database also has an advanced search feature, which we can access from the homepage.

Advanced search makes it easy to run searches with Boolean operators, which allow you to include or exclude search terms. Continuing my search about Florovsky, I can enter his name as one of my search terms.

I want to find articles about his work on ecclesiology or ecumenism, so I will put “ecclesiology OR ecumen*” as my term in the next line.

This phrasing means that I am searching for articles that contain either the word “ecclesiology” or any word that starts “ecumen.” The asterisk at the end of “ecumen” means that I can search for “ecumenism” and “ecumenical” without having to enter those words as separate search terms.

I can now run a search for articles about Florovsky and either ecclesiology or ecumenism or ecumenical relations.

Thanks for watching this video. If you have any questions about using Religion Database or other library resources, please don’t hesitate to contact the reference librarian.

Return to Screencasts and Videos