Finding Articles (in books and journals) on Specific Passages of Scripture In Ebscohost Databases
Articles in biblical studies journals and books may be found in these databases:
- ATLA Religion Database – most comprehensive collection of biblical studies journals with many articles available in full-text
- Catholic Periodical and Literature Database – complements ATLA with some additional articles from Catholic Publications not found in ATLA
- Old Testament Abstracts – provides abstracts and some full-text links to major Old Testament journals, overlaps with ATLA but adds some unique sources
- New Testament Abstracts – provides abstracts and some full-text links to major New Testament journals, overlaps with ATLA but adds some unique sources
You can search each of these databases in three ways. While there will be some overlap, each search can provide unique articles.
Finding articles on specific passages of Scripture in the Ebscohost databases:
Choose “Databases” from the dropdown menu. Choose “Ebscohost” from the top of the menu list. Click on “Ebscohost databases.”
Check the box by the individual databases listed to limit your sources to Scripture references. Then hit the “continue” button. That will take you to the basic search screen.
On the blue ribbon click “More” and then choose Scriptures ATLA Hierarchical Authority. Note: ATLA authority does not list the Deutero-Canonical books. To search them you will have to type the name of the book in the search box. For example, “Tobit.”
Choose the book of the Bible you want.
You have a number of choices here. If you click on the book itself, you will get a great number of hits that will address the entire book. For example, in Genesis there are 4,025 choices.
However, if you choose “expand” you can limit your choices to a specific chapter. For example, Genesis chapter 1 will yield 748 hits. Further narrowing, choose expand again and Genesis chapter 1 verse 1 will give you 229 hits.
There are various reasons to do a more complete search. By searching an entire book of the Bible you can get an idea of general themes, characters, etc. By choosing a chapter, your choices will be narrower but you will still get an idea of the surrounding topics to just one or two verses.
To further limit your choices, look to the left of the list of articles:
- Under “Limit To” you can choose full text which will let you read and print or email the article(s) from the computer. So you can, using our example, go from 228 articles to 75.
- Check “Scholarly Journals” for articles worthy of a graduate student’s attention. Choosing full text and scholarly journals will give 43 hits.
- Change the publication dates to narrow the publication dates of the articles you search. If we narrow our search from 1921 to 1980, the full text scholarly journals are reduced to two.
You can also use the advanced search to further limit your search to a specific language, journal title, and other limiters.
