









































55

Scholarly Communication in 
Biblical Studies
Lessons from the Social Sciences
Beth M. Sheppard, University of West Georgia

ABSTR AC T During a bibliometric analysis of the scholarship of 
ninety-five social science faculty members at the University of 
West Georgia (UWG), observations were made concerning poten-
tial differences between how scholarly communication is practiced 
by the disciplines of the social sciences and biblical studies. The 
fields appear to diverge on the role of book reviews, prevalence of 
co-authored materials, use of ORCIDs, and adoption of DOIs. In 
addition to highlighting these points, the dataset used for the proj-
ect is described. Finally, a few theological reflections are offered.

 
Dagobert Runes offered the bon mot, “People travel to faraway places 
to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home” 
(1967, location no. 2373). Although my terminal degree is in biblical 
studies, I recently had an opportunity to undertake a bibliometric 
project in what was for me an exotic scholarly land—the University 
of West Georgia’s (UWG) College of Social Sciences (COSS). The task 
involved analyzing faculty publications in that unit with an eye 
toward determining whether UWG’s Ingram Library could make 
strategic reductions in collection resources without adversely affect-
ing faculty research trajectories. As with any journey, though, as I 
was sifting the data, I couldn’t help but informally compare and 
contrast how scholarly communication as practiced by UWG’s social 
sciences faculty appeared to differ from my own experiences of 
publishing and researching in my home subject of biblical studies. 
Once I had a fairly substantial list of differences that included 1) the 
presence or relative lack of the book review as a genre for scholarly 
communication, 2) inclinations toward collaborative authorship or 
solo authors, 3) the use of ORCIDs (Original Researcher and Contribu-
tor Identifier) and 4) the pervasiveness of DOIs (Digital Object Identi-
fiers) in each field, I also spent some time in trying to make sense of 
some of the differences theologically. The observations are shared 



56  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

below. Before getting to them, however, kicking off with a brief over-
view of the UWG project and dataset as well as enumerating a few 
difficulties experienced in creating a comprehensive list of faculty 
publications is in order. 

THE UNIVERSITY OF WEST GEORGIA SOCIAL SCIENCES  
FACULTY PUBLICATIONS PROJECT

Let’s start with a few words about the University of West Georgia 
(UWG) at large and then lay out a few details about the College of 
Social Sciences (COSS). Foremost, unlike the majority of Atla member 
institutions, UWG is a state university and does not have a religious 
studies major, though interested students may cobble together a few 
courses in philosophy and history to declare a religion minor. No 
classes are taught from a confessional perspective due to the sepa-
ration of church and state and the fact that the school is supported 
by taxpayer funding. Within the Regent’s system of Georgia, UWG 
is a comprehensive university. To be more specific, it is a mid-sized 
regional school with an R3 Carnegie classification. Although known 
for serving undergraduates, graduate programs have flourished in 
the last half-dozen years, including a handful of EdD degrees and 
one PhD in Psychology. Tenure and promotion do require demon-
stration of scholarly activity—a precept laid out in general terms in 
the faculty handbook—with each discipline free to provide specific 
departmental guidelines in how those terms are to be met.

The College of Social Sciences, or COSS as it is known on campus, 
was selected for the bibliometric analysis since it was poised to 
undergo transition. At the end of the spring semester 2019, its long-
term dean announced her retirement from that position. In the wake 
of this transition, the campus began investigating whether or not the 
COSS might be combined with the College of Liberal Arts or perhaps 
even the College of Sciences and Mathematics. So, with the spotlight 
on COSS, it was  a logical moment for the library to dig into what 
was happening with regard to scholarly communication in that unit. 
The project began with instructions from library administration to 
compile three comprehensive title lists to include:

1) the titles of the journals in which faculty members in COSS 
publish and those of the monographs and edited works they 
authored,

2) the journals in which COSS faculty members are cited,1



Papers and Presentations  57

3) and all of the journals that appear in the bibliographies of 
their publications.

It is a herculean task and some of that work is still ongoing. This 
particular study reflects thoughts and findings that arose through 
the course of completing phase one and also analyzing a small subset 
of data gathered from phase three. 

The project began during the fall semester 2019 and focused on 
the scholarly output of the ninety-five full-time faculty members in 
COSS who taught in the departments of anthropology, criminology, 
mass communications, political science, psychology, and sociology. 

METHOD

Determining who served as full-time faculty members in the various 
COSS departments during the fall semester 2019 was the easiest part 
of the task. An administrative assistant in the office of the interim 
COSS  dean provided the list. Further, the decision was made to focus 
on publications irrespective of format that appeared “in print,” as 
opposed to being merely at press, during fiscal years 2014–18. In 
addition, it didn’t matter whether the faculty member was employed 
all five years at UWG or had been publishing for some portion of 
those years at another institution. We were simply interested in 
five years’ worth of publications for each individual. After all, we 
reasoned, a faculty member’s research trajectory didn’t necessarily 
shift entirely when he or she moved to UWG. In sum, no publication 
before June 30, 2013 or after July 1, 2018 made the cut, but those 
produced while individual faculty members were still employed at 
other schools did. In addition, co-authorship was considered irrel-
evant. Regardless of whether the UWG faculty member was the 
first author (principal investigator), a collaborating contributor,  a 
co-editor, or even a translator, the publication was added into the 
project. The only requirement was that the UWG faculty member’s 
name had to be included in the byline. Last, each publication was 
also only counted once. If co-authors, for instance, were both faculty 
members at UWG, the book, article or chapter was listed under the 
first UWG author named in the byline. If that first author was prolific 
and a co-author had no publications to his/her name, the subsequent 
UWG author was credited with the publication. This allowed us to 
track a side data point related to the number of faculty members 
who were actively publishing.  



58  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

 It ended up that there were several sources that proved useful 
for determining what materials the COSS faculty had published 
during the period. The primary one turned out to be the annual 

“Faculty Activity Report” (FAR) that was filed each year by the COSS 
dean with UWG’s office for institutional effectiveness and assess-
ment. FARs include each faculty member’s self-reported scholarly 
activity in a given fiscal year. The CVs faculty posted on their UWG 
faculty profiles were another useful source for compiling a list of 
faculty publications. Mining faculty profiles on sites like Google 
Scholar, Academia.edu, and Research Gate also proved helpful. As 
it so happens,  Google Scholar’s own underlying dataset is so large, 
publication results were unearthed even for UWG faculty members 
who had not created Google Scholar profiles. Finally, in the quest to 
create a complete list of faculty publications, each faculty member’s 
name was run through the UWG Ingram Library’s OPAC. Since the 
UWG catalog is shared with other institutions of higher education 
in Georgia, this ensured that we were able to sweep in a few other 
book titles that we didn’t hold in our own collection and of which 
we had not been aware. 

DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED IN CREATING A MASTER LIST OF 
FACULTY PUBLICATIONS

Before reporting the results, a word about the difficulties that were 
experienced in creating a comprehensive list of faculty publica-
tions might prove instructive. It is unlikely that the list that was 
ultimately complied is completely authoritative. One challenge, for 
instance, involved disambiguation of faculty names. Some faculty 
published using various surnames during the five-year span. While 
a few instances of multiple names for the same faculty member were 
unearthed through study of their CVs and faculty profiles, it is by no 
means certain that we always found all publications produced under 
earlier last names. 

Another difficulty involved flaws with the FARs themselves. It is 
clear that when faculty are filling out their individual forms they 
are uncertain whether to record items that were merely at press or 
fully in print; items for UWG’s fiscal year which runs July–June, or 
the calendar year; or how to record books or articles for publications 
completed in prior years that were recently translated by others, 
republications of earlier works without any revisions, or subsequent 



Papers and Presentations  59

editions/revisions of earlier materials. These struggles were evident 
when the same titles appeared in back-to-back years or the reports 
or when some titles mentioned in the reports never seem to (or have 
not yet) made it into print.

The lack of updated CVs on UWG faculty profile pages also made 
this project difficult. Some faculty CVs were years out of date. A hand-
ful of COSS faculty colleagues had not provided CVs for display on 
the UWG website at all. This is perhaps a function of profile fatigue. 
Faculty are creating profiles for LinkedIn, the UWG website, the 
professional associations of their disciplines, Google Scholar, and 
a variety of other academic repository services besides. Issues of 
profile exhaustion and expectations that faculty take the lead in self-
promoting their own scholarly output through creating profiles and 
adding their materials to repositories would likely be good fodder 
for a separate study in and of itself.

In any case, a final barrier to creating a comprehensive list was 
related to some faculty members intentionally excluding some mate-
rials published on sensitive subjects from public profiles and FARs. 
These included political party-specific analysis or criticism (perhaps 
excluded on the grounds that UWG’s funding is determined each 
year by the political party that is in power in Georgia) and pieces on 
paranormal phenomenon (a subject once quite in vogue amongst 
UWG researchers in psychology, but regarded as pseudo-science at 
best in some quarters of the academy). Since UWG faculty profiles, 
along with the FARs, are subject to Georgia’s laws on open records, 
the reticence to include these sorts of publications is explicable. 
Searching Google Scholar and the library databases, however, did 
aid in the discovery of at least some of this material. All told, though, 
these difficulties, from disambiguating authors’ names to placing the 
responsibility for self-reporting scholarly activity on faculty them-
selves, to attempts at actively keeping a record of some publications 
from the public eye, mean that the data set is reasonably accurate, 
but not necessarily without omissions.

THE RESULTS

The final list included 346 publications and represented activity by 
fifty-eight faculty members (61% of the COSS full-time faculty). The 
fact that thirty-seven faculty members did not publish during the 
five-year span is not alarming and does not reflect badly on them. To 



60  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

be sure, a number of them primarily worked in administrative roles 
elsewhere in the university and taught only rarely during the time 
period covered by the study. In addition, a few others were desig-
nated as clinical faculty and more still held only instructor status. 
Individuals in these categories are not expected to execute research.

Once the publications list was in hand, each entry was coded by 
material type: articles, chapters contributed to edited works, book 
reviews, and books (including sole-authored, co-authored, edited, 
and co-edited volumes). The results of this scholarly output by the 
UWG COSS Faculty are available in figure 1.

That articles predominated is not necessarily surprising. For virtu-
ally any discipline, including biblical studies, the ready availability of 
good quality journals means that solid article-length research pieces 
of 3,000–8,000 words can readily find a home. In the case of COSS, 
articles comprised 70% of the materials produced, followed by indi-
vidual chapters at 18%, books at 10%, and reviews a distant last at 2%. 

In addition, a random subset of 63 publications, or 18% of the 346, 
was selected for an in-depth analysis of their bibliographies. While 
18% may seem like an odd percentage, this number was due to the 
fact that our student assistants helped out with the project and were 



Papers and Presentations  61

asked to find PDFs for as many of the faculty publications as they 
could during one of their scheduled four-hour long library work 
slots. Sixty-three was the winning number. This sub-set of sixty-three 
included sixty-one articles, one monograph, and one book chapter. 
Each individual entry within the sixty-three reference lists was 
coded by type. The categories included: 1) book or chapter in a book, 
2) journal or newspaper article, 3) government reports, 4) general 
websites, 5) media/films, 6) TV news, 7) datasets/polls, 8) theses, 9) 
conference proceedings, 10) survey instruments, 11) laws/acts/bills, 
12) unpublished papers, and 13) software. A full breakdown of the 
number of hits in each category is available in table 1.

Table 1: COSS References by Type
Books & chapters in edited books 1192 38%

Journals/newspapers 1630 52%

Government and think tank 
reports

123 10%

General websites including 
university centers

42

Media/films/TV news 18

Datasets/polls 37

Theses 17

Conference proceedings 21

Survey instruments 12

Laws/acts/bills 10

Unpublished papers 26

Software 1
  

There were 3,129 total reference entries in the 63 publications for 
an average of 49.6 per faculty publication. Of these, 1192 or 38% 
were either full books and/or chapters in edited volumes. 52% were 
articles from journals or newspapers. The remaining 10% included 
all of the other various types of materials upon which faculty relied 
for their research. Granted, these results blur, to some extent, the 
differences between so-called “book-focused” disciplines, such as 



62  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

biblical studies, that regard the monograph as the pinnacle of schol-
arly communication, and “article disciplines,” like those that make 
up the COSS at UWG. The obfuscation was due to the fact that, when 
the reference lists were coded, chapters within edited volumes 
(which often may be equivalent to articles for purposes of tenure 
and promotion within the social science disciplines) were not disag-
gregated from monographs. Of course, one must recall that the main 
objective of this bibliographic study was to focus on determining 
what journal title subscriptions might be safely eliminated from 
the UWG collections and the initial coding scheme for this sample 
subset of sixty-three titles reflected that primary objective. As addi-
tional work with the dataset continues in future months and years, 
disaggregation of monograph references from chapters in edited 
volumes might be possible for comparison with another sub-set of 
the faculty publications.

TWO ROADS DIVERGE—OR DO THEY?  
THOUGHTS ON BIBLICAL STUDIES AND THE COSS STUDY

Although examining the COSS publications began with the objective 
of examining journal titles with an eye toward collection develop-
ment, it turned out that there were four areas involving scholarly 
communication as practiced by my COSS colleagues that were not 
part of the original itinerary, yet nevertheless snagged my attention 
because they appear to diverge a bit from how research is shared 
amongst scholars in the field of biblical studies. These included the 
role played by book reviews, the practice of collaborative authorship, 
the appearance of ORCIDs in article bylines, and, finally, the use of 
DOIs (digital object identifiers) in bibliographies.

Book Reviews
Let’s unpack each of these four elements. First, the fact that there 
were only eight book reviews represented amongst the three 
hundred and forty-six UWG social science publications was a fact 
that may seem astonishing given that reviews are a staple in biblical 
studies. While not necessarily counting toward tenure and promo-
tion within Bible departments at every institution (and subsequently 
not necessarily included on the CVs of Bible faculty), reviews are 
nonetheless a frequent activity in which scholars in biblical studies 
engage.2 Indeed, it is relatively easy to find the reviews that any indi-



Papers and Presentations  63

vidual biblical scholar has written (as well as those written about his/
her books) by executing federated searches of library resources using 
the author’s name. There are numerous places where such reviews 
of monographs and edited works can be published. The Review of 
Biblical Literature, produced by the Society of Biblical Literature, 
for instance, features high-quality reviews by doctoral students as 
well as faculty members of every rank. In addition, many reviews of 
interest to the field of biblical studies also appear in Reviews in Reli-
gion and Theology. Incidentally, our Atla colleague, Suzanne Estelle-
Holmer at the Yale University Library, has published an entire library 
guide in which she lists sources that focus on sharing evaluations of 
books (guides.library.yale.edu/c.php?g=295964&p=1973160).   

The lack of reviews in the social sciences may be the culmina-
tion of a decades-long trend in that field. To be specific, while the 
current issue of the American Sociological Review (ASR) does not list 
any reviews on its online table of contents, just over a half-century 
ago Lawrence E. Riley and Elmer A. Spreitzer (1970) expressed the 
opinion that book reviews in the social sciences were vital to assist 
scholars to keep current in the field. They observed that, in the 1960s, 
a good third of ASR featured book reviews (358).

Still, mystified about the low number of reviews in the dataset 
because thirty-four books  had indeed been written by the UWG  
social sciences faculty in the period, if not necessarily reviewed 
by others, I questioned the head of UWG’s Political Science Depart-
ment, Chapman Rackaway, who had authored some of the mono-
graphs.3 I wanted to hear about his view of the role of book reviews 
in his discipline. He explained that, in the social sciences, “Most of 
our tenure and promotion guidelines, even at R3 schools such as 
UWG, incentivize article publishing. Books are much more inten-
sive works but only count as the equivalent of two refereed journal 
articles so, especially for younger faculty, there is an incentive to go 
for articles” (pers. comm., July 15, 2020). Presumably, then, if articles 
are encouraged and books are merely works of supererogation in 
which tenured full professors might indulge, then it would follow 
that book reviews would not feature as prominently as they do in 
Bible. Indeed, just eyeballing the list of the 34 books authored by 
COSS faculty, it did seem that they were primarily written by senior 
faculty, though follow-up work of  adding faculty rank to the data 
set would be necessary to confirm the exact number authored by 
those of each rank. For her part, N. Jane McCandless, who retired as 

http://guides.library.yale.edu/c.php?g=295964&p=1973160


64  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

Dean of COSS, was gracious to visit with me by phone (July 22, 2017). 
In that conversation, she revealed that, during her lengthy career, 
she has regularly completed non-published peer reviews of manu-
scripts and book proposals for editors at a variety of publishing 
houses. The idea of publishing a formal review of a published book 
or even using a review in her research, however, was simply never 
on her radar. She only consulted them when considering textbooks 
for adoption in courses.

It appears, then, that the activity of writing and publishing book 
reviews may be discipline-specific, though subject to change over 
the course of time as a field develops new modes and preferences 
for sharing research. At this point in time, though, scholars in bibli-
cal studies still share their opinions of other’s work through means 
of book reviews, even if that genre is no longer really in vogue in 
the social sciences.

Collaborative Authorship   
After dispatching the puzzle concerning the low number of book 
reviews in the COSS set of publications, focus turned to yet another 
apparent difference between that data set and practice within the 
field of biblical studies—preference for undertaking research and 
writing collaboratively in the social sciences versus alone in Bibli-
cal Studies. It turned out that, in our dataset, the preponderance of 
articles produced in COSS were co-authored. In fact, of the 63 publi-
cations, 47 of them (or 75%) were co-written, leaving only a quarter 
that were produced by a single researcher. My own guess is that 
the percentages of co-authored to solo-authored materials would 
be almost completely reversed in biblical studies, though a formal 
study of this point is needed. Respondents to a survey undertaken by 
Taylor & Francis (2017, 2)4 concerning collaborative authorship in the 
humanities and social sciences indicated that the practice of having 
multiple authors was an emerging trend in both the humanities and 
social sciences, but that study did not disaggregate larger subjects 
like religion, let alone a subfield like biblical studies. In an attempt 
to confirm my hunch that biblical studies remains a single-author-
driven discipline, and given that COVID-19 meant I couldn’t browse 
the stacks in the UWG library to access sample publications, I pulled 
a copy of Jesus, Skepticism & the Problem of History (Bock and Komo-
szewski, 2019) off my office shelf to examine it. That was a book to 
which I had contributed an essay, so it was easily at hand. While that 



Papers and Presentations  65

volume as a whole benefited by the collaborative work of co-editors, 
when it came to individual chapters themselves, only three of the 
seventeen essays were co-authored. Although the published version 
of the book did not include works cited lists at the end of each chap-
ter nor a final composite bibliography, while I was writing my own 
contribution (without a collaborator, of course), I had developed 
a running bibliography. According to that record, I cited sixty-one 
different resources. It turns out that only seven (or 11.48%) of the 
total resources in my works cited list were co-authored.5 While this 
single example does not necessarily prove the point that Bible schol-
ars prefer to go it on their own, the prevalence of single authors over 
co-authors in the field of biblical studies can also be inferred by look-
ing at the sample bibliographic entries selected for inclusion in the 

“Student Supplement for the SBL Handbook of Style Second Edition.” 
The authors of that citation resource did not present a single instance 
of a multi-author work amongst the samples they provided (LeMon 
and Breed 2015, 2-4, 10, 17). Likewise, in the full SBL Handbook of 
Style, only single-author examples appear in the section that demon-
strates how to  cite journals (SBL, 2014, §6.3). 

Persistent Author Identifiers (ORCIDs)
The tendency of authors in the social science disciplines to work 
closely with collaborators was not the only oddity that reminded 
me that I was traveling in a strange land when working with the 
COSS dataset. Indeed, I noticed that some publishers had included 
ORCID (open researcher and contributor ID) numbers in the short 
author bios that appeared on the PDF versions of the articles them-
selves. That was an eye opener. One sees institutional affiliations 
and faculty emails, but generally not ORCIDs in biblical studies 
author bios. Though, to be sure, a few publishers of Bible content 
like Sage, which produces the Journal for the Study of the New Testa-
ment are ORCID members.6 ORCID member publishers have pledged 
to encourage registration for ORCIDs amongst contributors to their 
journals. Even so, Sage, as a case in point, does not yet add ORCIDs 
to the bios in JSNT. This is surprising given that ORCID provides 
guidance to publishers on the most appropriate ways to display the 
persistent identifiers on published works (orcid.org/content/jour-
nal-article-display-guidelines). In disciplines like the hard sciences, 
where scholarly communication is primarily article-based, the use of 
author identifiers often serves as a way to track research produced 

http://orcid.org/content/journal-article-display-guidelines
http://orcid.org/content/journal-article-display-guidelines


66  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

by grant recipients (Dunford and Rosenblum 2018, 236). This may 
explain the lack of their use in our own field. After all, grant funding 
for Bible research is very rare indeed. 

Regardless of its relationship to tracking grant funding, the use of 
persistent author identifiers like ORCIDs and other types of persis-
tent author identifiers in the academy at large stretches back almost 
fifteen years, so one would think the practice would start to catch 
on soon in biblical studies. Margaret Mering, in her history of their 
use, pointed out that SCOPUS launched author identifiers in 2006, 
Clarivate Analytics introduced Researcher IDs in 2008, and ORCID 
numbers themselves were initiated independent of any particular 
publisher or discipline in 2012 (Merling 2017, 265-66). That same 
year, the ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) was also 
rolled out, though, granted, the ISNI designation differs a bit from 
the others because it is also used by composers, musicians, artists, 
and others whose creative output is not limited to text. Nevertheless, 
the string used in the ORCID does conform to that of the ISNI (Powell, 
Hoover, et al. 2019, 627).

For authors who adopted some of the earlier scientific discipline-
based schemes and created author profiles in which they included 
their publications, both SCOPUS publication lists and any references 
linked to Researched profiles now merge easily into ORCID profiles.7   
Given this flexibility, there is no question that the ORCID is emerging 
as the standard for authenticating authorship and disambiguating 
author names.

Theological librarians themselves have also recognized the value 
of ORCIDs. At the seventieth Atla conference, for instance, Carisse 
Mickey Berryhill, Jason Fikes, and John B. Weaver encouraged 
attendees to assist young scholars in obtaining ORCIDs (2016, 114). 
The following year, the Atla Taskforce on Scholarly Communication 
in Religion and Theology urged, “Register for an ORCID iD (it’s free) 
and connect your education and publications as desired. As you 
work with faculty, scholars, and graduate students, encourage them 
to register as well” (Anderson, Keck, LeBlanc, and Creamer 2017, 10). 
While some progress on this front has been made, there is still quite 
a way to go. That many Bible scholars have not considered obtaining 
ORCIDs is easily demonstrated by executing a few searches in the 
ORCID registry (orcid.org/search/node/69). For example, a search 
for “Society of Biblical Literature” that I executed on June 15, 2020 
returned only 221 profiles in which individuals had listed member-

https://orcid.org/search/node/69


Papers and Presentations  67

ship in that organization. Given that there are 5,751 full members, 
the profiles returned in the search represents only about 3.8% of 
that member category (Society of Biblical Literature, 2019). Inciden-
tally, a similar search for “American Theological Library Associa-
tion” returned only 27 hits.8 It might be possible that we librarians 
simply need to get the word out about ORCIDs. Perhaps one way to 
promote sign-ups might involve Atla member librarians creating 
videos about the ORCID registration process that can be distributed 
to Atla’s membership. In turn, individual Atla librarians could share 
the videos with faculty and graduate students at their respective 
schools. Another option might take advantage of the fact that, in 
non-COVID-19 years, many Atla members attend sessions at the Soci-
ety of Biblical Literature Annual meeting while Atla full-time staff 
members maintain a vendor booth in the exhibit hall to promote the 
suite of Atla databases and other products. Might it be possible for 
Atla member librarians attending SBL to volunteer at the booth with 
an eye toward encouraging SBL conference attendees who wander 
by to register with ORCID?   

Digital Object Identifiers (DOI)
The final area in which the social science disciplines seem to diverge 
from normative practice in biblical studies, given what was observed 
with the COSS set of publications, is the adoption of DOIs (or, digi-
tal object identifiers). DOIs are stable URLs to digital articles, and 
DOI-based URLs are liberally sprinkled through the bibliographies 
of the articles and books written by UWG’s social science faculty 
members. In addition, when I looked at the title pages of the UWG 
faculty members’ publications themselves, I noticed that it was 
not unusual for publishers to include any given article’s DOI in the 
margins, headers, or footers of the final PDF versions made avail-
able in the library’s subscription databases. 

Although based on general observations rather than a solid statis-
tical study, I must confess that I rarely see DOI addresses included 
in the bibliographies of the biblical studies books and articles that 
I consult for my own research. Though, to be fair, while DOI was 
introduced in 1997, it didn’t become an ISO standard until 2010, so 
perhaps scholars are not yet consulting materials that might include 
DOI to any great extent. Biblical studies publications and articles tend 
to have long lifespans and are incorporated into research for many 
years and even decades after their original release dates.



68  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

Another reason why DOIs may not frequently appear in the works 
cited lists of biblical studies publications may be due to the fact that 
born-digital publications in biblical studies are a rarity. The Direc-
tory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), for example, generated only 
twelve entries when I conducted a search using the term “biblical 
studies.” Of those twelve journal titles, three do not yet have any 
published content and another three do not offer/supply DOIs. That 
leaves only six journals in that directory that actually do have arti-
cles that are marked by DOIs.9 This is a concern because a publish-
er’s willingness to pay the fees associated with offering and taking 
the time to register DOI numbers is often the mark of a worthy and 
reputable journal as opposed to one that is predatory or, at the least, 
disreputable. Questionable journals are those that are untried and 
often unindexed. Predatory ones masquerade as a well-respected 
publication by employing a similar title and branding scheme. It 
seems that the goal of predatory journals is to generate revenue 
streams by scooping up article submission fees paid by unsuspecting 
potential authors (Tiliuțe 2016, 138). DOIs would cut into the profit 
margins of these dubious publications, which often eschew offer-
ing them. Given that the presence or absence of DOI is a marker of 
journal quality, this raises the question of what responsibility we, as 
members of Atla, should take in working with editors and publishers 
of the many fine Bible and other religious content journals that are 
not presently incorporating DOIs into the e-versions of their publi-
cations to educate them about persistent identifiers and assist them 
in implementing the DOI scheme. 

The issue of publishers’ role in promoting DOI aside, the case 
that individual biblical researchers may not be rapidly incorpo-
rating DOI in their bibliographies is, no doubt, complicated by the 
fact that many documents that scholars access in digital format are 
either simply scans of print counterparts or PDFs generated from 
the layout file in the publisher’s software. Both of these methods of 
producing e-versions essentially mean researchers are working with 
digital surrogates that are virtually indistinguishable from print 
versions and may not include DOI addresses in headers and footers, 
unlike what was observed with many of the social science articles 
in the dataset under examination at UWG. Instead, when it comes to 
articles related to the Bible, DOI may end up as part of the article’s 
metadata. The upshot, of course, is that the onus is on the researcher 
to click several times to locate DOI information. Along the way, the 



Papers and Presentations  69

researcher may be tempted to simply capture the URL in the search 
engine bar on the page where the PDF itself resides rather than the 
DOI. This impulse is, of course, contrary to recommended practice 
according to the SBL Handbook of Style, where DOI is preferred over 
the simple URL (2014, §6.1.6).

Although not itself a biblical studies journal, Atla’s own publica-
tion, Theological Librarianship (TL), may be used to illustrate the 
point about the difficulties researchers in religious studies disci-
plines may encounter in locating and capturing DOI for use in their 
works cited lists. To be specific, the earliest issues of TL make an arti-
cle’s DOI visible with other metadata, such as the article title, within 
the journal management system, but DOI does not actually appear 
on the linked PDF itself. Further, when a researcher clicks on the PDF, 
one discovers that it is much more intuitive to cut/paste the general 
URL that appears in the search engine at that point than to scroll back 
to capture the DOI from the description of the article.10 Even though 
the DOI for each of the articles, essays, and reviews has recently been 
made available in a handy index (Hughes 2019, 21–87), nonetheless, 
this case is illustrative of the struggles to implement new advances 
and protocols in information access in the fields of theology, Bible, 
and other religious disciplines in ways that make the researcher’s 
job easier rather than more onerous. We should not, however, be 
disheartened. We are still in the midst of transitioning to an era in 
which e-formats are rapidly becoming the norm. In that foreign and 
new landscape, theological librarians are in the unique position of 
having the means and the voice through our association to influence 
best practices for how publishers of Bible research incorporate DOIs 
into their journals and article PDFs.

THEOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS

Without a doubt, some of the differences that biblical scholars might 
discover after visiting the novel lands of the social sciences and 
observing a handful of points where the disciplines appear to diverge, 
can be chalked up to simple methodological differences. For instance, 
there are labs in some fields like research psychology where teams 
of researchers are the norm, methods such as text coding in sociol-
ogy that require collaborators to ensure inter-coder reliability, and 
the reliance on statistical data generated by polling that may require 
partners to execute. All of these elements would position the social 



70  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

science disciplines to be open to collaborative authorship more read-
ily than a humanities-focused field like Biblical studies. 

Nevertheless, it behooves theological librarians who operate in, 
for, and out of theological contexts to speculate about whether some 
of the differences between the lands of biblical studies and the social 
sciences might be the result the confessional vantage point adopted 
by many biblical scholars. In that vein, I want to offer just a few theo-
logical reflections.

First, when it comes to the fact that sole rather than co-authorship 
appears to be the norm in biblical studies, it is important to recognize 
that sometimes Bible research is undertaken in service of a scholar’s 
devotional activities. In short, biblical scholarship may be, as Anselm 
put it, a personal act of  fides quarens intellectum, or faith seeking 
understanding. To that end, like private devotions, Bible scholar-
ship naturally is individualistic. Along these same lines, the appar-
ent disciplinary preference in the field of Bible for book reviews 
(which are generally written by individuals), might be explained 
as just another mode in which this devotional element in the disci-
pline is expressed. After all, scholars generally choose the titles they 
would like to evaluate and likely are drawn to one title over another, 
perhaps for reasons related to personal faith or denominational lean-
ing given that books in Bible are frequently published by presses 
with particular theological outlooks.

Before leaving the topic of scholarship in service to faith, it also 
is worthwhile to point out that often biblical scholarship takes the 
form of exegesis—an activity that is unique to the discipline. It is a 
method of analyzing the Bible text for the purpose of writing and 
delivering a sermon. Here we come back again to the individual. 
While the members of a congregation hopefully benefit from hear-
ing a sermon, very, very rarely do two preachers share a pulpit and 
preach simultaneously. Sermon preparation and delivery, even when 
modest input is received by others, tends to be a solo exercise. 

By contrast, it seems as though the individual doesn’t have such a 
central role in the social sciences. Rather, the focus of sociology is the 
group—how groups form, how groups function, and so forth. Even 
within the field of psychology, which is concerned with the mental 
well-being of individuals, the aim is preparing individuals to live 
and function within society (the group). One might speculate, there-
fore, that social scientists themselves may be pre-disposed to work 
with others as collaborating authors given the central interests of 



Papers and Presentations  71

their disciplines, while many who undertake writing and research 
in biblical studies may be inclined to go it alone.

In addition to the influence of faith in the lives of many Bible 
scholars, it is important not to lose sight of the role played by moral 
and justice concerns expressed by faith communities when it comes 
to issues related to e-resources. Interest in implementing DOIs, or 
registering for ORCIDs, for instance, might take a back seat in our 
discipline to worries about accessibility to digital content by those 
without technology or internet connections. This would not be the 
only arena in which Atla librarians might express apprehension 
about inequities related to cost and access in religious publishing 
(Keck 2018).

As a final theological point to ponder, one might also wish to 
someday explore what percentage of biblical scholars, if any, view 
the exercise of promoting one’s own publications through the use of  
scholarly profiles and  ORCIDs  as verging on prideful boasting. That, 
of course, would cause us to engage in a rousing discussion related 
to hamartiology.

Suffice it to say, scholarly communication as undertaken in 
biblical scholarship in some ways might seem as exotic to a faculty 
member in the social sciences as were the current trends in that field 
that I observed in my own brief sojourn with a handful of my social 
science colleagues’ publications. In any event, Runes was correct. 
Looking at the work done by the social scientists did prompt me 
to more closely examine and question some aspects of scholarly 
communication in biblical studies that I had heretofore overlooked. 
To that end, it is good to be a tourist in another academic discipline 
on occasion.

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Clifford Blake, Andrew J. Keck, Jérémie LeBlanc, and 
Deborah Beth Creamer. 2017. “Scholarly Communication: A 
Guide for the Perplexed.” Atla Summary of Proceedings 71: 8–12.

Berryhill, Carisse Mickey, Jason Fikes, John B. Weaver. 2016. 
“Owning their Vices:  How Librarians Can Help Graduate 
Students Develop Publishing Literacy.” Atla Summary of Proceed-
ings 70: 111–16.



72  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

Bock, Darrell and J. Ed Komoszewski, eds. 2019. Jesus, Skepticism & 
the Problem of History. Grand Rapids, MI:  Zondervan Academic.

Dunford, Robin and Bruce Rosenblum. 2018. “Keeping it Authentic:  
Reconciling ORCID iDs Gathered at Submission with the Author 
Manuscript.” Learned Publishing 31: 236–40. doi.org/10.1002/
leap.1159.

Hughes, Barnaby. 2019. “Index of Theological Librarianship, 
2008–2019.” Theological Librarianship 12, no. 2: 21–87. doi.
org/10.31046/tl.v12i2.554. 

Keck, Andrew J. 2018. “Theological Libraries and Scholarly Publish-
ing in Religion and Theology.” Theological Librarianship 11, no. 2: 
27–37. doi.org/10.31046/tl.v11i2.518. 

LeMon, Joel M. and Brennan W. Breed, eds. 2015. “Student Supple-
ment for The SBL Handbook of Style.” Second edition. www.sbl-
site.org/assets/pdfs/pubs/SBLHSsupp2015-02.pdf.

Mering, Margaret. 2017. “Correctly Linking Researchers to Their 
Journal Articles:  An Overview of Unique Author Identifiers.”  
Serials Review 43, nos. 3-4, 265-267. https://doi.org/10.1080/00987
913.2017.1386056. 

Powell, James, Carol Hoover, Andrew Gordon, and Michelle 
Mittrach. 2019. “Bridging Identity Challenges: Why and How One 
Library Plugged ORCiD into Their Enterprise.” Library Hi Tech 27, 
no. 3, 625–39. doi.org/10.1108/LHT-04-2018-0046.

Riley, Lawrence E. and Elmer A. Spreitzer. 1970. “Book Reviewing in 
the Social Sciences.” American Sociologist 5, no. 4 (November): 
358–63. www.jstor.org/stable/27701668.

Runes, Dagobert. 1967. Treasury of Thoughts: Observations over Half 
a Century. Philosophical Library. Ann Arbor, MI: University of 
Michigan. Kindle.

Society of Biblical Literature. 2014. The SBL Handbook of Style. 
Second edition. Atlanta, GA: SBL Press.

———. 2019. “2019 SBL Membership Data.” www.sbl-site.org/assets/
pdfs/sblMemberProfile2019.pdf. Accessed January 2019.

Taylor & Francis Group. 2017. “Co-authorship in the Humanities and 
Social Sciences: A Global View.” authorservices.taylorandfrancis.
com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Coauthorship-white-paper.pdf.

http://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1159
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http://doi.org/10.31046/tl.v12i2.554
http://doi.org/10.31046/tl.v11i2.518
http://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/pubs/SBLHSsupp2015-02.pdf
http://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/pubs/SBLHSsupp2015-02.pdf
http://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-04-2018-0046
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27701668
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Tiliuțe, Doru E. 2016. “Digital Object Identifier for a Better Image of 
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74  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

ENDNOTES

1 Incidentally, the citation search that the citation tracker 
embedded in the Proquest databases was found to be useful 
in finding citations that were present in unpublished theses 
but, otherwise, generally overlapped with Google Scholar 
in terms of journal citations for pbulications by faculty at 
UWG’s COSS. Google Scholar was superior for unearthing 
citations of journal articles and unpublished papers that 
were in institutional repositories as well as edited books and 
monographs. Web of Knowledge (Web of Science) generally 
returned the fewest citations and tended to overlap those in 
either Google Scholar or ProQuest.

2 In my career as a librarian, I have always been able to 
include major reviews of over 1,000 words in my tenure and 
promotion portfolios, but I was encouraged that they should 
not represent more than 20% of my scholarly output in any 
five-year review period. This was an exception made, given 
the library side of my workload. My materials were reviewed 
by committees primarily comprised of biblical studies 
faculty, since I also taught biblical studies classes. Colleagues 
in biblical studies were advised by their own mentors to 
avoid presenting reviews as evidence of scholarly activity. 
Nonetheless, virtually all of my biblical studies colleagues 
at the various insituitons where I have worked produce 
book reviews as a by-product of both reading avariciously 
to remain current in their fields and providing feedback to 
colleagues who have taken the time to write book-length 
works.

3 Although I kept no formal count, it was obvious as I 
searched for faculty publications that very few of the books 
written by the COSS faculty had been reviewed by others. A 
chief exception was an introductory textbook written by a 
professor of psychology for which there were about three 
reviews.

4 The Taylor & Francis survey was sent to 9,180 researchers in 63 
countries who served as editors of Taylor & Francis journals. 
Survey results were disaggregated by global region, age of 
respondent, and gender of respondent. I am uncertain about 
how many journals (if any) published by Taylor & Francis 
are dedicated to biblical studies, though the publisher does 
produce the Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological 
Association, the journal titled Religion, and the Journal 
of Religious and Theological Information, which might 



Papers and Presentations  75

include occasional articles focused on biblical studies. The 
remaining religion offerings are generally interdisciplinary, 
such as the Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Social Work 
and Religion, State & Society.

5 While individual chapters in edited books were generally solo 
authored, the editorial activity of the volumes themselves 
was often collaborative. To break that down, within the 61 
bilbographic entries, six were in books that had multiple 
editors, while only two were in volumes that had a single 
editor.

6 In fact, in addition to Sage, publishers of biblical studies 
and religious studies materials and journals like Elsevier, 
Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, 
ProQuest, and Taylor & Francis are amongst the seventy-
seven publishers who are member organizations of ORCID. 
As time passes, one would expect other publishers of Bible 
content to join their ranks. These publishers were identified 
as ORCID members on June 15, 2020 by limiting the search 
of members  in the ORCID registry (orcid.org/members) to 
only those identified as “publishers.” Incidentally, I was not 
able to find Atla listed as a member organization when I 
sorted the full list of ORCID members by “associations” or 
publishers, but perhaps it was classified in some other way.

7 Instructions for doing so have been provided on a guide to 
ORCID produced by the Pao Yue-Kong Library at Hong Kong 
Polytechnic University (libguides.lb.polyu.edu.hk/orcid/
addworks).

8 The number of those holding ORICDs may be higher. It is 
possible to obtain an ORCID number without spending the 
additional time to complete a full profile on the site.

9 These statistics were compiled in early June 2020.
10 For instance, the URL for my own piece in the very first issue 

of TL is theolib.atla.com/theolib/article/view/29, though the 
DOI is doi.org/10.31046/tl.v1i1.29.

http://orcid.org/members
http://libguides.lb.polyu.edu.hk/orcid/addworks
http://libguides.lb.polyu.edu.hk/orcid/addworks
http://theolib.atla.com/theolib/article/view/29
http://doi.org/10.31046/tl.v1i1.29

