Databases Listed by Topic or Function

TOC/What is included here?

The focus here is online (web accessible) databases and reference works, but we have also listed a few old-fashioned books in areas where no online resources are available. Some of the databases are full text, but most are citation databases (i.e., author, title, etc.; information is provided, but not the complete books or articles themselves). Full-text databases are marked as such. are listed by topic of coverage when possible. Some resources are not topical and are listed by function (e.g., book review indexes or biographical directories).

The Resources

Universal/omni-topic resources useful in many different subject areas

  • WorldCat is a key resource for almost any topic. It includes information about millions of books, ebooks, and journal articles about an enormous range of topics in scores of languages. WorldCat includes materials owned by DTS libraries and by thousands of other libraries around the world. The default setting is to limit results just to what DTS owns. WorldCat has clickable links to almost all our ebooks and to many of our online journal articles. WorldCat also provides information about each print book we own, including classification number, shelving location, and current availability (whether it on the shelf or checked out). Your personal WorldCat account allows you to renew books you have on loan, view due dates, place holds, etc. Our Introduction to WorldCat describes and explains how to use it.
  • WorldCat This is the OLD WorldCat and the old search engine.
  • Ebooks on EBSCO. DTS has access to over 300,000 ebooks on this platform. It covers a very wide range of topics. All of these ebooks are also listed in WorldCat Discovery, with links to the ebooks. And WorldCat is not limited to EBSCO ebooks. However, WorldCat only searches the metadata records (authors, titles, subjects). If you go to the EBSCO site you may also search every word in every ebook in the EBSCO ebooks. That is something you cannot do in WorldCat. Likewise, you can go to the ProQuest ebook central to search the ProQuest ebooks full-text.
  • ProQuest Ebook Central DTS has access to more than 300,000 ebooks on this platform, including about 100,000 Spanish language ebooks. It covers a wide range of topics. All of these ebooks are also listed in WorldCat Discovery, with links to the ebooks.
  • Academic OneFile (via Gale). Covers a wide range of topics. Includes online content from about 17,000 scholarly journals. Not particularly strong in religion. When you display a full record, Gale automatically displays a butchered plain text version of the article which lacks formatting, lacks non-English characters, lacks tables and charts, and lacks pagination. But you can download a complete properly formatted pdf by clicking the download icon. Gale Power Search searches Academic OneFile and many other Gale databases all at the same time. The following are most likely to be helpful: General OneFile (10,000 non-scholarly magazines); Pop Culture Studies and Fine Arts (scholarly journals on pop culture and drama, music, art history, filmmaking); Leadership and Management (400 journals on organizational dynamics, leadership, adult learning and continuing education); Communication and Mass Media (500+ journals); Psychology (600 journals).
  • JSTOR includes about 3,000 full-text scholarly journals in the fields of history, archaeology, classics, the arts, literature, education, language, and more. Includes helpful coverage of theology/religion and the ANE and Greco- Roman world.
  • Google Books. Notice this is books.google.com, not generic google.com. Google has scanned millions of books, including many theological works. Google Books allows you to display, copy, print, and download the complete contents of works published over 95 years ago because such works are no longer protected by copyright. Google Books displays limited portions of works that may still be protected by copyright law. In some cases publishers have granted permission to display rather large portions. Google does not support copying, printing, or downloading. Of course you are especially interested in more recent works for your research, so the free online books will not meet all your needs. Nevertheless, Google Books is a great way to identify relevant recent books that you can buy or borrow from a library. To locate books unavailable from DTS, search for the book in WorldCat. Supply your zip code and WorldCat will tell you which libraries near you own the book.
  • Google Scholar with DTS affiliation. Google Scholar attempts to retrieve only "scholarly" materials. (That seems to mean works that include footnotes and similar citations.) This is much more selective than generic google.com. In addition, links to Google Scholar from the library website provide something special: an affiliation with DTS so that SOME licensed (pay-walled, restricted-access) items retrieved by Google such as JSTOR articles will be authenticated through our proxy server. In other words you will be able to view more full-text articles with this link than you would be able to view if you just navigated to Google Scholar and searched without the proxy.

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Christianity/Theology in general

  • WorldCat is a key resource for almost any topic. It includes information about millions of books, ebooks, and journal articles about an enormous range of topics in scores of languages. WorldCat includes materials owned by DTS libraries and by thousands of other libraries around the world. The default setting is to limit results just to what DTS owns. WorldCat has clickable links to almost all our ebooks and to many of our online journal articles. WorldCat also provides information about each print book we own, including classification number, shelving location, and current availability (whether it on the shelf or checked out). Your personal WorldCat account allows you to renew books you have on loan, view due dates, place holds, etc. Our Introduction to WorldCat describes and explains how to use it.
  • Atla Religion Database. Atla RDB is the most important database for theological studies. It indexes journal articles and book reviews from most major English language theological journals and from many non-English journals. It also indexes essays/chapters in books. (But use WorldCat to search for books.) Atla covers literature on Bible, theology, church history, pastoral ministries, Christian education, intercultural ministries and missions, and non-Christian religions. It has clickable links to the full text of many online articles. Our Introduction to Atla explains how to use it.
  • Proquest Religion. This is a smallish collection of full-text religious articles and dissertations.
  • Index Theologicus. IxTheo lists books, articles and book reviews on theology and religious studies broadly, mostly from 1980 to date. It is smaller than Atla, although it does cite European literature, especially German, not in Atla. There is a lot of inconsistency in the metadata. For example, names may be written with the first name last or first, and with or without dates. But quality is improving. And there are several specialized interfaces to IxTheo that provide enriched metadata and refined access. The new-item interface lists very, very recent content in IxTheo. Index Biblicus (formerly BiBIL and BILDI) supports searching IxTheo by bible passage (e.g., John 3:16). That is not available in the general interface. But search for books of the Bible and other terms in multiple languages. Index Canonicus is a partial extract of Roman Catholic cannon law and offers specialize access for that topic.
  • Index Religiosus. We no longer subscribe to this database.
  • Although no longer published in print, from 1920 to 2014 the print volumes of the "Elenchus" section of the journal Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses were an important bibliography for Christian theology in the broad sense. Print vols continue to be shelved in the Reference Collection, first floor of Turpin. The database Index Religiosus is supposed to absorb the older content in ETL, but progress has been very slow.

Additional resources pointer Additional resources/cross-references: WorldCat and other databases in the Universal/Omni-topic databases group include material relevant to all areas of theology. See below for systematic theology and church history. The Biblical Studies section should be supplemented by Ancient World/ANE/Greco-Roman classics resources. Pastoral ministries/practical theology covers preaching, counseling, church administration, spirituality and religious life. Science, social science, and counseling resources, and general (secular) Education sections may be relevant for work in Christian education. Non-Christian religions and missions are treated together. The library has thousands of additional bibliographic and reference resources on a wide range of theological and secular topics. Ask reference staff about your particular needs. And remember, only a tiny fraction of the best theological literature is on the Internet. But consult Miscellaneous religious web sites for some of the better sites.

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Biblical studies

  • Any enrolled DTS student taking a course for credit has access to Logos Bible Software.
  • Atla Religion Database provides strong coverage of biblical studies, and it has a specialize scripture reference index that simplifies searching for bible passages. See fuller description above.
  • Old Testament Abstracts and New Testament Abstracts provide one paragraph summaries of journal articles and books about the Bible, biblical languages, and history and archaeology of the biblical era. These two databases began as print-based indexes, and the databases do not include all the information from the oldest print volumes. These databases link to only a small number of online resources. Our Introduction to OTA/NTA describes and explains how to use them.
  • IRBS/IZBG International Review of Biblical Studies provided abstracts of scholarly journal articles from 1952 through 2011. It is now defunct, but the old volumes are available. Most abstracts are in German. The subject classified arrangement requires you to browse broad subject categories. For full bibliographic information, location, and call numbers of print volumes, see WorldCat. If the German is too much of a stumbling block, consider other sources of abstracts, especially Old Testament Abstracts and New Testament Abstracts.
  • École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem indexes books, journal articles, and essays, most of them dealing with biblical exegesis and archaeology of the Near East, as well as the language and literature of people of the Ancient Near East. Strong in Palestine and Qumran studies. Uses a French or English interface with French subjects. Search the Library Catalog or Title field in English and examine hit records to find French subject headings. The gospel of Matthew, for example, is written "Matthieu NT". The advanced search allows you to choose a book, chapter, article, periodical, map, etc. Search indexes for author, series, or subject. The default search operator is AND. Search also with NOT and OR. Add records to a cart and download or print the cart.
  • Elenchus Bibliographicus Biblicus of Biblica was the most comprehensive bibliography for the field of biblical studies. Don't confuse it with Elenchus of ETL. EBB covers books, articles, essays, reviews, and dissertations in 20 languages from 1920 to 2011 (although coverage before 1960 was not so comprehensive). EBB includes an author index, a scripture passage index, and Greek and Hebrew word indexes, but there is no specific subject index (in recent volumes), so you must browse under broad subject categories outlined in the table of contents for subject access. EBB can be difficult and time consuming to use, but it is essential if you need to be exhaustive. Ask reference staff for advice about how to use it efficiently. For full bibliographic information, location, and call numbers of print volumes, see WorldCat.
  • Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception covers a wide range of biblical and related topics along with their reception in religious, cultural, and academic fields. Articles are signed and include bibliographies. "See also" at the end of an article leads to related articles. Browse article titles or search the full text, title, or author. Search using Boolean operators: and, or, not; use an asterisk (*) for truncation and quotation marks for phrases. EBR Online to comprise 30 volumes, 18 available as of 12/2020. Article-level metadata not yet available in WC. User Guide.
  • Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon (CAL). A lexicon in progress that will eventually contain all Aramaic words from 9th c BCE until the 13th c CE. Website supports lemma searching, browsing text, creating concordances, searching for English glosses. Texts include targums, inscriptions, legal texts, ostraca, letters, manuscripts, religious texts, Peshitta, and much more. Hosted by the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and available free to everyone.

Additional resources pointer Additional resources/cross-references: Atla and WorldCat provide good coverage of biblical topics. The old print volumes of ETL supplement EBB.

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Systematic theology and church history

  • "Elenchus Bibliographicus" of the journal Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses was considered the most comprehensive source for systematic theology. See description of this print resource above. It is supposed to be absorbed by the database Index Religiosus, but progress has been very slow.
  • See Philosopher's Index for technical philosophical literature, including topics like theism, ethics, epistemology, and some aspects of apologetics.

The main church history bibliographies are available in print volumes only. Revue d'Historie Ecclesiastique is the most comprehensive bibliography for the field of historical theology. It includes books, articles, and book reviews. It is especially strong for 20th century, European, and Catholic history. It is supposed to be replaced by the database Index Religiosus (but progress has been very slow). Bibliographia Patristica is the largest bibliography for patristics/early church history, but it is now defunct. However, see the BIBP database below. Sixteenth Century Bibliography and Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte are the main Reformation history bibliographies. For full bibliographic information, location, and call numbers of print volumes, see WorldCat.

  • BIBP Patristics database BIBP (Base d'Information Bibliographique en Patristique) lists citations from major scholarly periodicals in the field of early and medieval church history. The native interface is in French, but you can use this database even if you don't know French. Subject headings ("descripteurs") usually appear in the records in both English and French. You may use logical operators ET (and), OU (or), SAUF (not). To execute a search, click "Lancer la requete."
  • Search Biblindex by bible passage to discover which church fathers cited that passage. Currently (2020) in beta and giving incomplete results. The goal of the index is to allow users to identify quotations in all Jewish and Christian literature of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, including all published volumes of Biblia Patristica and Sourcs Chrétiennes.
  • Iter indexes literature pertaining to the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700), including journal articles, books, essays in books, and book reviews. Religious topics are prominent. No full-text to download.
  • Finding Augustine cites articles and books on his life, works, doctrine and influence. Supplement it with the annual print bibliography in Revue d'études augustiniennes et patristiques.
  • Corpus Thomisticum includes the complete works of Thomas Aquinas in Latin according to high quality critical texts. The Index provides access to searchable lemmatized Latin texts in the Index Thomisticus. Bibliographia Thomistica provides bibliography. Guest users can use some helpful features at no cost, but a paid subscription is required for some features. In contrast, https://aquinas.cc provides a Latin text (no lemmatization) and English translation. The Blackfriars print edition is easy to use and provides Latin and English. The call number is BX1749 .T48 1964
  • Calvinism Resources Database includes about 30,000 citations for journal articles, book essays, book reviews, and lectures. The list of journals indexed is unavailable but extensive. Browse by subject or author. Search by keyword, title, subject, author, journal, year, or abstract with Boolean AND and OR but no wildcard. Search and mark records. Save or print a bibliography from the marked records. Marks are deleted with a new search. As of Dec. 2020, sorting works imperfectly. Maintained by the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies and available free to all.
  • MelLit lists book and articles on Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) published from 1991 onwards.
  • Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University has published online both the 26 volumes of Edwards' works in print and the 47 volumes of his previously unpublished material. Includes sermons, notebooks, essays, letters and personalia. Includes a few secondary sources such as biographies, a chronology, audio, video and images. Offers phrase searching, scripture lookup, and concording. Both searchable and browsable. Indexes sermons by date and biblical reference. Yale University offers the database free to anyone.
  • Internationale Bonhoeffer-Bibliografie provides bibliography on the life and works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer from 1933 to the present.
  • Charles Ryrie Archives contains over 2000 documents including sermons, teaching notes, articles, and book manuscripts. Ryrie was chairman of the theology department at DTS.
  • John F. Walvoord website contains articles, books, and sermons. Walvoord was president of DTS.
  • Twentieth Century Religious Thought. Part 1 on Christianity includes works by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pope Benedict XVI, Hans Urs von Baltasar, Leonardo Boff, Sergius Bulgakov, Rudolf Bultmann, Helder Camara, James Cone, Mary Daly, Ivone Gebara, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Adolf von Harnack, Bernard Lonergan, Henri de Lubac, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Jon Sobrino, Dorothee Sölle, Ernst Troeltsch, and John Howard Yoder; and a selection of the unpublished papers by Reinhold Niebuhr.
  • Comprehensive Bibliography on Syriac Christianity (New website under development. Temporary access to bibliography at the Zotero site.) Helpful for the study of Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, pre-Islamic Arabs, and early Islam. Includes more than 20,000 bibliographic entries (as of Dec. 2020), some of which were culled from existing on-line bibliographic databases, print bibliographies, and journals. Primarily includes Western scholarship but is adding works of scholars from Asia and the Middle East. Freely available to everyone from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
  • Bibliography on Christianity in Palestine/Eretz Israel. Started in 2000 with the goal of offering a comprehensive bibliography on Christianity in Palestine. Includes dissertations as well as articles, essays, and books. Search by author, title, or keywords. Keywords may include time periods (centuries or epochs using Roman numerals, e.g. XX CE). Limit by date of publication. Browse by author, year, keyword, or era. Freely available to everyone from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As of Dec 2021, website unavailable.
  • AAS Periodicals, 1691-1904. This collection of early American popular (not-scholarly) magazines covers a wide range of topics. Religious titles include magazines which focus on specific denominations as well as those which cover general works on theology, baptism, sin, conduct of life, Sunday schools, Bible and missionary societies. It also covers Art, Architecture, Music; Books reviews; Business, Agriculture, and Industry; Civil War and Slavery; Ethnic Groups; Family and Society (including children, women, education); History and Description; Language and Literature; Law, Politics, and Government; Philosophy; Revolutionary War; Science and Medicine. Because the magazines are so old, there are many gaps, many missing isssues.

Additional resources pointer Additional resources/cross-references: Atla, and WorldCat provide good coverage of systematic theology and church history.

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Pastoral ministries/practical theology/denominational resources

  • Christian Periodical Index indexes articles and book reviews from about 200 evangelical periodicals. Includes both popular and scholarly titles. Some overlap with Atla, but many unique titles. CPI is a helpful guide to popular evangelical culture and religious life. Subject, author, and book review indexes. Full coverage begins in 1956.
  • RIM (Research in Ministry) lists and abstracts many but not all North American DMin dissertations. Bibliographic fields include title, author, abstract, degree granting institution, subjects, and date range. Some fields, such as the author field, bring up a list of entries when you begin to type. Choose an item from the list. Other fields allow the Boolean operators, AND, OR, and negation. To negate a term, attach a hyphen (-) to the beginning of the word. Use double quotes to search for phrases. Use parentheses to construct complex searches, e.g., (a OR b) AND (c OR d). Click a title in a list of results to see the subjects, advisor, date, and other information. Individual students create records and upload the abstracts for their dissertations, and partication is declining, so this database is gradually becomming less and less complete. For instructions on adding a record for your DMin project to the database, see https://rim.atla.com/about. WorldCat lists many DMin dissertations, often with links to TREN pdfs; you may find it a better resource than RIM.
  • Bible.org provides access to bible study helps and expositional works. This is also the home of the NET Bible translation.
  • RightNow Media. All students at Dallas Theological Seminary receive a free personal membership to RightNow Media. RNM streams over 15,000 Bible study videos from over 250 publishers and ministries. RNM has studies for small groups, families, students, leadership development, and much more. Sign up for your free account.
  • Catholic Periodical and Literature Index covers Roman Catholic periodicals, essay collections, church documents, papal documents and electronic resources expressly addressing the practice and intellectual tradition of Roman Catholicism. Now included in Atla Religion Database.
  • Christian Reformed Church Periodical Index Contains over 100,000 citations to publications of institutions of the Christian Reformed Church or to related publications, 1866 to date. Includes Banner and Banner of Truth. For a complete list of periodicals indexed click About. To search, click Advanced Search and enter search terms. Boolean AND and OR supported within and between fields. Choose the field: options include subject or author browse as well as standard fields. Sort by author, title, date, etc. Specify the publication if you wish and click Search. Mark citations of interest and click Print Bib to see the list of marked records. From here you can sort, print, or copy. Marks are cleared after each new search. For detailed information about this resource, see Greg Sennema's "The Christian Reformed Church Periodical Index: A Local Solution to Indexing Periodicals," Journal of Religious and Theological Information 5 (2003): 119-34. CRCPI is maintained by Hekman Library staff of Calvin College and volunteers from around North America. It is freely available to all.
  • The Seventh-day Adventist Periodical Index, produced at Andrews University, provides indexing for over 40 SDA periodicals covering 1973 to present. Retrospective indexing continues to push the date back. Most are popular/nonscholarly, and apparently not indexed elsewhere. Many of the articles cited are available online. Search by subject, author, article title, or journal title.
  • Restoration Serials Index indexes articles from about 80 periodicals produced within the restoration movement (Church of Christ). Most are popular/nonscholarly, and apparently not indexed elsewhere. Many are very hard to find. Search by keyword, subject, author, or title. Search engine allows quotation marks for phrasing and logical operators between fields. Available free to anyone.

Southern Baptist Periodical Index covers popular magazines and a few scholarly journals by and for Southern Baptists, including official denominational magazines and some independent publications. It includes author, title, subject, and book review indexes.

Additional resources pointer Additional resources/cross-references: Dealing with marriage counseling? Youth problems? Poverty? Drug addiction? See the Science, social science, and counseling resources section for insights from sociology, psychology, economics, criminology, medicine, and anthropology. Business resources may help you with Christian leadership and church administration studies.

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Non-Christian religions and missions

  • Science of Religion. SR abstracts about 600 scholarly articles per year on social, cultural and philosophical studies of religion in the general and on specific world religions. Although it includes material on Christianity, it is most useful for non-Christian religions. We have print volumes through 2015. Each volume has an author index. There is a separate cumulative subject index for vols 1-18. For full bibliographic information, location, and call numbers of print volumes, see WorldCat. Print volumes are no longer published and we currently do not have a subscription to the database.
  • Internet Sacred Text Archive. Largest full-text archive of "holy books" on the net. Covers religion, mythology, legend, folk-lore, occult, and sacred books or canonical texts in many religious traditions (Koran, Bible, Gita, etc.)
  • National Library of Israel has replaced the old print index Kiryat Sepher. It lists all books published in Israel in all fields and all languages. It also lists many books from other countries dealing with Judaism and Israel. The RAMBI database has replaced the old RAMBI print index to scholarly periodicals on all aspects of Judaica, modern and ancient, (including biblical studies and rabbinics), and area studies of the land of Israel. It is possible to search (and display) in both English and Hebrew. Subject headings for books of the Bible look like this: "Genesis (Book of)".
  • Index Islamicus. II lists journal articles and books on Islamic culture and history. Much of the material is in Arabic. For full bibliographic information, location, and call numbers of print volumes, check WorldCat.
  • International Review of Mission. Beginning in 1912, the print volumes of the journal IRM include a very important serialized bibliography on mission and cite both scholarly journal articles and books in several languages. All aspects of missions and evangelism. For full bibliographic information and holdings details of print volumes of IRM, check WorldCat.
  • Missionalia Abstracts. From 1973 to 2005 the journal Missionalia abstracted articles on missions. We extracted the abstract sections and bound it separately. The classified structure is supplemented by skimpy geographical and subject index. MA is available in print volumes only. For full bibliographic information, location, and call numbers of print volumes, check WorldCat.
  • Bibliographia Missionaria. The main annual Roman Catholic bibliography on world missions. Thorough. Now defunct. Last volume published in 2014. For full bibliographic information, location, and call numbers of print volumes, see WorldCat.
  • The Globethics Library focuses on the field of ethics, particularly as it applies to higher education, policy engagement, and ethical leadership in less developed countries of the world. The database has changed its focus many times. For several years it was associated with the World Council of Churches and called the Global Digital Library on Theology and Ecumenism. Registration is free but you must register to download content. It contains some unique unpublished material.
  • For older material, see the print vols of the Dictionary Catalog of the Missionary Research Library.

Additional resources pointer Additional resources/cross-references: Atla provides good coverage of missions, but limited coverage of non-Christian religions. WorldCat covers all religions and missions.

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Miscellaneous religious web sites

  • Websites on Religion provides links to religious and especially Christian Internet resources. Aims to serve needs of clergy and seminary faculty and students. Provided by Atla free of charge.

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Ancient world/Archaeology/ANE/Greco-Roman classics resources

  • ABZU is probably the biggest and best listing of mostly scholarly works (books, articles and websites) on the Ancient Near East. There is no topical organization for browsing, and entries are not annotated. Records do have subject headings, and the site is searchable.
  • Keilschriftbibliographie (KeiBi). This is the International Cuneiform Bibliography from the journal Orientalia, and an important tool for ANE studies. The online version includes all volumes from the inception of the paper version in 1940 to present except it excludes the two most recent volumes so as to promote sale of the print volumes. Choose Advanced Search on the left-hand menu to find items that meet specific criteria. Check the phrase box to denote a phrase in the top box; use the wildcard * for multiple characters, and the wildcard ? for a single character. Search uses Boolean operators, AND, OR, OR NOT, and AND NOT between named fields but not within them. Type a title or a portion of it exactly as it appears in the record including punctuation. Enter an author or editor name as Surname, First name or initial. Use the Bibliographies menu option to search by volume. Click PropylaeumSEARCH beside a record to find subject information, locations (usually European), and other information about an item you find. You can save entries from a results list and go to Saved Entries on the left-hand menu to print or export them. Records are exported in BibTeX format and can be imported into Zotero. KeiBi is freely available to all from the University of Tübingen.

The annual "Keilschrift" (cuneiform) bibliography in the journal Orientalia and various annual bibliographies in Archiv für Orientforschung on Assyriology, Egyptology, etc., are important for ANE studies and OT backgrounds. Orientalia is available in print and in Atla. Archiv für Orientforschung is available in print and in JSTOR. For full bibliographic information, location, and call numbers of print volumes, see WorldCat.

  • Orion Dead Sea Scrolls database. Covers articles, essays, and books on scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls from 1995 to the present. Updated weekly. Search by author, title, date of publication, Judean Desert document, and more. Single words in a field are treated as if they have a truncation operator. Multiple word searches default to phrasing. Do not use quotation marks. Type last name first for an author's name, and use a comma if you add a first name or initial after it. AND, OR, and NOT do not work as operators within a field. Click Add Search Term to use multiple fields. To search by keywords, click the "Click to search by keywords" button; enter a search string and choose primary keywords if desired. Or hover over a name in primary keywords and click Show records. Results display as a list of citations. Some include abstracts and/or full text. Greek and Hebrew letters may not display properly. This bibliography is a joint project with the journal, Revue de Qumran, and appears in that journal twice a year. Check the pre-1995 vols of RQ for older material. Provided by the Orion Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Free to all.
  • Resource Pages for Biblical Studies. Torrey Seland's guide to internet resources focuses on social and religious background for NT studies. Includes the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, DSS, Josephus, church fathers, linguistic resources, archaeological studies, studies of the Greco-Roman world, and rabbinic websites. Especially strong for material on Philo. Overall, slim annotations, but a wealth of resources.
  • Online Responsa Project. Hebrew Bible and traditional Jewish commentaries, the Babylonian Talmud with Rashi's commentary and Tosafot, the Jerusalem Talmud, the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides, Shulchan Aruch with commentaries, Midrashim, and hundreds of books of responsa. Grammatical tools. Excellent source for rabbinic sources. 100% Hebrew language; no English. Even chapters and verse numbers of the Bible are in Hebrew, not Arabic numerals. Login is not necessary in order to search (in Hebrew) and view a result list. But if you wish to view detailed context for search results, you must login as a subscriber or register as a guest.
  • Rabbinic texts in Hebrew. Free access to Bible, Mishnah, Talmud, Tosefta, Mishneh Torah (Maimonides). Hebrew interface; no English.
  • Talmud, Soncino English translation.
  • National library of Israel
  • L’Année philologique indexes journal articles and books from 1928 to date concerning all aspects of classical studies from second millennium BC to about 600 AD, including Greek and Latin literature and linguistics, early Christian texts and patristics, Greek and Roman history, art, archaeology, philosophy, religion, mythology, music, science, and scholarly subspecialties such as numismatics, papyrology and epigraphy. Some citations have abstracts, and the abstracts are in English, German, Spanish, French or Italian. Therefore you need to use search terms in all of those languages if you wish to be thorough. For example, to search for a bible passage, use the book name and chapter with quotation marks in the All fields choice under Free search, and use multiple langauges. A search for John 3 would look like << "john 3" OR "johannes 3" OR "jean 3" OR "jn 3" >>. You might also type "testamenta" in the Ancient author and text field under Thematic search. Adding testamenta to a search will reduce the number of extraneous results, but it will miss some relevant results. It is most useful if the book name is common. See our Introduction to L’Année philologique
  • Perseus. Search and display the full text of ancient Greek and Latin primary source documents. Links to lexicons and sometimes to English translations. Extremely useful site for NT studies. If you have never used Perseus, see our brief intro to Perseus.
  • Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. TLG includes nearly all surviving literary Greek texts dating from 8th century B.C. to the fall of Byzantium in A.D. 1453. As of Dec. 2020 it includes over 110 million words, over 10,000 full-text documents by 4,000 authors. It does not include "non-literary" documents like business records, general correspondence, inscriptions, etc. Find information about the authors and works included in the TLG Library in the Canon of Greek Authors and Works at the TLG website. Searching requires you to create a personal login just for TLG. See our Introduction to Searching TLG.
    Wondering what the difference is between Perseus and TLG? Perseus provides convenient English translations for a limited but important body of searchable Greek text. TLG offers no English, but covers far, far more Greek text. Both provide links to LSJ lexicon entries. Use Perseus to save time. Use TLG to be thorough. To confuse you even more, there is also an abridged TLG covering about 1,000 works by 70 authors. This abridged version is available free to anyone. If you use the link on the DTS website to connect, you will get access to the full database. If you use some other link, you will probably get the abridged version.
  • LSJ at TLG. This online version of the Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon gives each word in the lexicon its own entry. Navigate to any of these Greek headwords using the left menu or type the Latin alphabet equivalent of Greek letters in the search box. Access pop-up snippets of the immediate context of cross-referenced text for each lexical entry. The lexicon links to the full TLG corpus for users who have an institutional subscription.
  • The Searchable Greek Inscriptions database currently (Dec. 2020) contains Greek inscriptions from Greece, Cyprus, Thrace, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and other provenances organized by period and corpora. Browse by geographic area or search for words and phrases. The inscriptions are NOT included in TLG (which consists of literary texts only). Available free from Packard Humanities Institute. See our SGI tutorial for a brief intro to searching this database.
  • The Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB) is part of the Trismegistos (TM) platform. It gathers information about all texts from antiquity, including papyri and inscriptions, and includes entries for about roughly 850,000 texts (as of 10/2020). Each record includes a unique Trismegistos number that links to information about the text, including date, provenance, language, material content, a list of publications and collections, links to sources for more information if available, and a transcript of the text if available. Here is an example of a 2d century papyrus (TM 2229). You have to scroll down to see the Greek text.
    LDAB offers many searchable fields. Click the "i" to the right of a field for information about it. The search engine supports logical operators OR, AND, NOT (all caps). Quotation marks do not function as adjacency/phrase operators. If the system does not recognize a search term or operator, it will bring up either 0 or 16,658 results (as of 10/2020).
    To search LDAB for a bible passage, type the name of the book of the Bible in the Ancient Author & Work field, and type the chapter in the Book/Chapter field. Search for 1 Corinthians using << 1 corinthians >> or << 1corinthians >>. Do not place the "1" after the book name as you might in Atla Religion Database. Search. At the top of the results page, words like "Bible book" after the Bible book name say that the software understood your search. If your search terms appear at the top of the results page, click the plus sign under them and choose one of the options listed to narrow your search. Scroll down and click a TM ID to view information about a specific text. Youtube has a video on how to use it (9/2019).
  • Electronic Resources for Classicists is one of the most comprehensive sites on the web for this narrow topic. It includes annotated links to all sorts of resources.
  • Classical Latin Texts contains most literary Latin texts up to A.D. 200. Enter from Home by agreeing to the terms of use. Find links at the upper left for Authors, Word Search, and Concordance. Click Authors to retrieve a list of classical authors. Choose an author for a list of works, and choose a work to read the text. Use Word Search to search for a word, phrase, or words related by specific operators. Click the gear icon for the list of operators or to set up filters for authors or works. The program does character string searches but allows for word breaks. Use Concordance to retrieve a line of text for each occurrence of your word or phrase with the citation on the left. Click a citation to go to the text. Classical Latin Texts is provided free of charge by the Packard Humanities Institute.
  • Thesaurus linguae Latinae. This provides a searchable index to pdfs of the old print vols; it is not the modern de Gruyter database.
  • Loeb Classical Library Online. LCL includes more than 520 volumes of Greek and Latin texts with English translations. Search by author, title, words in Greek and Latin texts, and words in English translation. Use quotation marks to delimit an exact phrase. Advanced search supports "OR" and "AND" operators. You can also do an initial search for a single word, then pick "Search within Results" to specify an additional word. Texts are not lemmatized or morphologically tagged, so you have to enumerate many inflected forms and use wildcards carefully to retrieve all forms of a verb, for example. Also, LCL volume and page is the only organizational structure, so you must browse to find a particular reference like Josephus Antiquities II.8, for example. Use TLG, Perseus, and Logos when you need advanced grammatical search options. Use Loeb to display Greek with corresponding English translation. Incidentally, about 300 of the old public domain volumes are available free for download here: https://www.edonnelly.com/loebs.html

Additional resources pointer Additional resources/cross-references: Biblical studies section cover archaeology, history, and culture of the Biblical world. NLI offers full coverage of Jewish history from all time periods, but include much literature written in Hebrew. WorldCat lists books on all aspects of the ancient world.

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Humanities/Philosophy/Language/Literature/Arts

  • Humanities Source Ultimate indexes and abstracts about 2,700 periodicals, of which about 1,700 are available full-text online. No books. It covers humanities broadly, including Greco-Roman classical studies, culture, folklore, literary and social criticism, literature, linguistics, performing arts, visual arts, religion, and philosophy. History is sometimes counted as one of the humanities, but HSU does not include history. Remember to use our more specialized databases in religion, philosophy, and classical (Greco-Roman) studies if you are interested in those areas.
  • Philosopher's Index cites and abstracts scholarly journal articles, essays, books, and book reviews, published from 1940 to the present in English and major European languages. PI focuses on typical areas of philosophical inquiry like aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, logic, and metaphysics, but also includes literature on philosophy of education, history, science, religion and other fields. Try sample searches for religion, faith, free will, theism, interpretation (= hermeneutics), philosophical anthropology (= nature of man), soul and resurrection to get a feel for the range of useful topics covered. Includes some full-text content.
  • PhilPapers cites journal articles, books, and essays in books. Many citations have abstracts. Many citations link to full-text (mostly open access content). As of July 31, 2024, PP claims 2,670,000 entries categorized in 5,917 categories!!! Philosopher's Index claims only 650,000 records. That would seem to make PP the bigger database by far. (See https://philpapers.org/subscriptions/comparison.html vs https://philindex.org/scope/). Yet a search for the phrase "virtue ethics" in PP yields 895 items, while the same search in Philosopher's Index yields 2184. A search for soul yields 900 in PP but 8742 in PI. A search for the phrase "immortality of the soul" yields 277 in PP and 248 in PI. These results depend on default search engine behavior as well as on the metadata/records. We need to make a more detailed comparison based on title by title results to provide a more rigorous comparison. At this time we recommend you use both databases if you need to be thorough. PP is sustained by a community of volunteers who provide citations, upload full-text articles, and classify citations. PP provides services for the community including a jobs board and a social network which is home to most(?) professional philosophers.

Additional resources pointer Additional resources/cross-references: WorldCat and other databases in the Universal/Omni-topic databases group include material relevant to humanities.

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Education resources

  • ERIC (direct) cites and abstracts over 1.5 million items related to teaching, learning, and educational systems. About 1 million are journal articles. Most articles are NOT available full-text at the eric.gov site. It also includes about 500,000 unpublished ERIC documents, plus a few books and theses. Many of the unpublished documents are available full-text. It contains a mix of scholarly and practical works. This is a US government publication designed to support secular education at all grade levels. It does not attempt to cover church or religious education systematically, but it does include some coverage of the topic, especially as church and state intersect.
  • Education Source Ultimate. Ed Source indexs and abstracts nearly 3,000 periodicals, of which about 2,000 are available full-text online. It includes both scholarly peer-reviewed journals and practical trade publications. It covers all aspects of American education from pre-school to post doctoral studies, including some coverage of private and Christian schools. It does not cover religious education programs or activities in churches. Examples of topics covered include the following: Elementary and early childhood education; Higher education; History of education; Educational assessment and evaluation; Disabilities and gifted education; Educational management; School administration; Literacy standards; Multicultural/ethnic education; Special education; Teachers and teacher education; Teaching methods; Urban education; Vocational education; Continuing education; and education in specific subject areas (e.g., math and reading). Education Source uses subject headings that are similar to the terminology used in ERIC, so it is practical to search both databases simultaneously.
  • United States Census Bureau: Education Provides information on a variety of educational topics ranging from enrollment statistics to school costs and financing.
  • United States Department of Education. Education research and statistics, and information on federal education policy.
  • [United States] National Center for Educational Statistics. This big site includes a lot of features and functions.
    Use the Search for Schools, Colleges, and Libraries locate educational institutions in the U.S. by name, state, city, or zip code. Limit searches to public schools, private schools, colleges, or public libraries. Information provided for schools includes address, enrollment, demographics, and student-teacher ratio.
    National Assessment of Educational Progress. "NAEP is charged by Congress to monitor the knowledge, skills, and performance of the nation's children. NAEP provides objective data about student performance at national, regional, and state levels."
    Common Core of Data (CCD): Information on Public Schools and School Districts in the United States. NCES offers search tools and data resources containing basic information and statistics on public elementary and secondary schools as well as on schooling in general. It allows the user to search for public schools and school districts, compare the finances of a school district with its peers, and create customized tables for schools, districts, and states over multiple years.
  • Ballotpedia Education Policy Offers information about education policy and laws for each state in the U.S. Overview articles on topics such as charter schools, STEM education, and blended learning. Over 300,000 articles total.
  • ResearchConnections: Child Care and Early Education. Searchable database with much full-text.

Additional resources pointer Additional resources/cross-references: WorldCat and other databases in the Universal/Omni-topic databases group as well some databases in the social sciences group (below) are relevant to education. But for religious education, use Atla.

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Science, social science, health, and counseling resources

  • Sociology Source Ultimate indexes and abstracts over 3,000 journals, of which about 1300 are available full-text. It includes both scholarly peer-reviewed journals and practical trade publications. It covers the following topics: behavior and social issues, abnormal behavior, child development, demography, discrimination, economic development, ethnic and racial studies, gender studies, human relations, marriage and family, migration, political sociology, population growth, poverty and wealth, religious faith, rural and urban sociology, social development, social justice, social movements, social psychology, social structure, social work, socio-cultural anthropology, sociological history, sociological research and theory, substance abuse, urban studies, and violence.
  • Databases for counseling discusses the databases most useful for clinical psychology, psychiatry and counseling.
  • APA Psycinfo (via EBSCO) lists over 5 million citations to technical scientific literature in the field of psychology and psychological aspects of related disciplines including anthropology, business, medicine, education, law, linguistics, and sociology. Thorough coverage of clinical psychology and counseling. Remember to use the PubMed/MEDLINE if you need access to psychiatric literature, and the Atla database if you need to find literature about counseling from a religious perspective or in a religious context.
  • ProQuest Health Research. This includes a mix of technical scientific content and consumer content.
    1. The psychological portion indexes and abstracts about 1500 publications, primarily scholarly journals. It contains over 2.5 million records, with over 1.3 million both full text and peer reviewed. In addition to clinical and social psychology, it covers behavioral and developmental psychology, neurology, personality, and psychometrics as well as related disciplines such as genetics, addiction, criminology, and social welfare.
    2. The technical medical portion is based on MEDLINE. But we recommend you use the PubMed version of MEDLINE to obtain access to more online articles.
  • PubMed comprises more than 35 million citations stemming primarily from the biomedicine and health fields, and related disciplines such as life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering. This includes extensive coverage of psychiatry, and significant but limited coverage of clinical psychology and practitioner counseling literature. Many, many citations include links to full-text articles. Coverage begins in the 1800s! MEDLINE is the largest component of PubMed. For information on searching PubMed, see the PubMed User Guide. PubMed is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and is available free to everyone.
  • Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection covers emotional and behavioral characteristics, psychiatry & psychology, mental processes, anthropology, and related fields. Provides full text of over 500 journals and indexes others as well.
  • Mental Measurements Yearbook. We do not have access to recent volumes of MMY. However, Reviews from MMY for about 4,000 commercially available tests are available as follows.
    • Alphabetical list of test titles.
    • Classified arrangement of tests by category. The categories (and number of tests) are: Achievement (129);;Behavior Assessment (211); Developmental (229); Education (153); English and Language (304); Fine Arts (20); Foreign Languages (46); Intelligence and General Aptitude (293); Mathematics (111); Miscellaneous (327); Neuropsychological (176); Personality (892); Reading (211); Science (33); Sensory-Motor (78); Social Studies (13); Speech and Hearing (146); Vocations (736).
  • Counseling and Therapy in Video (via Alexander Street) has about 1500 online videos for the study of social work, psychotherapy, psychology, and psychiatric counseling. Includes counseling sessions and demonstrations; expert consultations; lectures, presentations, and interviews of well-known therapists; and discussion guides. Material is selected to prepare counseling students. Materials are curated and developed to meet the educational and research needs of a variety of counseling curricula.
  • Video Journal of Counseling and Therapy (via Alexander Street). Videos of lectures and workshops from renowned counselors and psychologists.
  • Behavioral and Mental Health Online (via Alexander Street) provides a diverse collection of video and text for anyone studying in the area of mental health (e.g, clinical counseling, social work, nursing, psychology and behavioral health). Includes documentaries on the human condition, clinical mental health demonstrations, actual therapy sessions and transcripts (text), as well client narratives and reference works.
  • Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts (via Alexander Street). We have access to part one which is a searchable collection containing 2,000 transcripts of counseling and therapy sessions, plus 44,000 pages of first-person narratives illuminating the experience of mental illness and treatment. Also include reference works to contextualize the primary material.
  • Taylor and Francis Online provides access to many social science and humanities journals, covering anthropology, archaeology, arts, humanities, behavioral science, business, management, economics, criminology, education, geography, urban studies, environment, media, cultural and communication studies, politics, international relations and area studies, public health, social care, and sociology.
  • ProQuest SciTech. Topics include natural sciences, aeronautics, astrophysics, biology, chemistry, computer technology, geology, aviation, physics, archaeology, marine sciences and materials science. Does not cover psychology or social sciences.

Additional resources pointer Additional resources/cross-references: WorldCat and other databases in the Universal/Omni-topic databases group include material relevant to the sciences.

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General reference

  • Oxford Reference. Full-text subject-specific reference books such as the Encyclopedia of the Reformation. This is a good place to go for an initial overview of a topic. At this time (Dec. 2020) we have over 50 reference works from Oxford. Oxford Handbooks are also helpful.

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Statistics and brief facts

  • ARDA/Association of Religion Data Archives offers hundreds of data collections on religion. The ARDA collection includes data on churches and church membership, religious professionals, and religious groups. Find denominational profiles, syllabi for religion courses, statistics for topics on religion, and religious profiles for virtually all countries of the world and any county or city or state in the U.S. See results of online surveys; watch worship services of different religious groups; and explore cross-national data sources on religion.
  • USA.gov/statistics provides access to a wealth of US government statistics on demographics, crime, economics, education, environment, health, etc.

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Video

  • RightNow Media. All students at Dallas Theological Seminary receive a free personal membership to RightNow Media. RNM streams over 15,000 Bible study videos from over 250 publishers and ministries. RNM has studies for small groups, families, students, leadership development, and much more. Sign up for your free account.
  • Academic Video Online. Over 75,000 videos, ranging from 1 min. to well over an hour in length. Video types include biography, case studies, counseling sessions, documentaries, lectures, news stories, performances, short stories, speeches, and more. Science, anthropology, counseling and therapy, education, and films are among the subjects covered. Video transcripts offer a choice of language, including Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, and Korean. The search field defaults to Anywhere but choose author, video title, abstract, video transcript, etc. Restrict date, document type, and language as desired. Operators, such as AND and OR, are in all caps as in other ProQuest databases. Searches retain previous choices unless you clear them.
  • Behavior and Mental Health Video. Over 3000 videos and over 3000 texts related to mental health. Useful for counseling, social work, nursing, psychology, and behavioral health. Content includes clinical mental health demonstrations, therapy sessions, documentaries, psychotherapy transcripts, client narratives, and reference works. Browse by therapeutic approach, presenting condition, or content type. Search using single or multiple words and use parentheses for phrases. There are no Boolean or proximity operators. The advanced search allows you to select terms from a list of terms in some fields and to restrict results by date. To read a video transcript or a text in another language, click the language icon (white “A” with blue background) on the upper right and choose among dozens of languages, including Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, and Korean.

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Dissertation indexes

  • ProQuest Dissertationscites most U.S. doctoral dissertations. It includes few dissertations outside the U.S. Coverage of professional degrees (like DMin) is weaker than coverage of research degrees (like PhD). It also includes a small number of masters theses. Records include abstracts since about 1980. We have access to the humanities and social sciences portion (not the natural sciences and technology portions). It provides over 2 million citations and 1.4 million full-text dissertations. By default the search engine searches the full-text of the documents. If you are retrieving too many irrelevant citations, then just search the title and/or abstract field. Be warned the so-called Subject Headings are very broad (e.g., religion, biblical studies) .
  • WorldCat covers not just books and articles, but also millions of theses and dissertations (TD) on all topics and in many languages. Indeed, it may list more TD than any other source. WC is unique in that it includes both published and unpublished dissertations. When you search for TD, be sure to change the scope from "DTS Libraries" to "Libraries Worldwide". Then use the "Format" limiter in WorldCat discovery to restrict results to TD. Most WC records for TD have standardized subject headings that support high precision searches. But most records lack abstracts. Only a small fraction of the records have links to full-text documents.
  • Google Scholar. GS includes links to the full-text of millions of theses and dissertations, including most of what is in NDLTD and OATD. And GS is very easy to search. This combination makes it a terrific resource. But GS provides no reliable way to filter search results to just theses and dissertations. Further, it usually lacks controlled vocabulary metadata, and this can lower precision (and relevance ranking) dramatically. (GS does have access to some metadata from OCLC WorldCat for published dissertations in Google Books. OCLC shares with Google.) Use quoted phrases, not single words, for best search results in GS.
  • Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations NDLTD provides links to more than six million theses and dissertations covering all subject areas. All of these theses and dissertations are available full-text online; most are open access, but some reside behind paywalls. Metadata records come from many sources, and standards vary. Many records lack subject headings. Most have abstracts.
  • Open Access Theses and Dissertations. OATD is similar in size and coverage to NDLTD, and it has the same metadata issues. It has a different search engine than NDLTD has, with different options that might sometimes be helpful. In our experience, performance is frequently sluggish. Everything in OATD is available full-text online, open access.
  • DART-Europe E-theses provides access to 1.2 million open access theses and dissertations from 29 European countries. It is apparently complete for German dissertations since 1998. Retrieving text is a multi-step process. Search for a topic and use a link in the full record to bring up the webpage at the university website that links to the full text.
  • EThOS Electronic Thesis Online Service offers access to full-text doctoral theses from participating UK Higher Education Institutions. It contains over 500,000 records at this time (12/2020), but most are non-theological. To see a thesis, create a login and check the agreement to honor the conditions of use. After that you may download the thesis to print and/or store it electronically for an unlimited time. If you want to read a thesis that EThOS has not digitized, you may request it from them. Staff from EThOS will inform you when the thesis is ready for download or will let you know if they are unable to make it available. Many UK institutions offer free download to the researcher. A small number of participating institutions do not offer Open Access, and the researcher may have to pay for digitization in that case. EThOS is operated by The British Library on a not-for-profit basis and charges are set only to cover costs.
  • These France includes every thesis/dissertation in France since 1985 plus some older ones.
  • TESEO seems to represent the main universities in Spain.
  • La Referencia provides links to 3.2 million documents. They are mostly journal articles, but it also includes 300,000 doctoral dissertation and 700,000 masters theses from 12 mostly South American countries.
  • National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan. You must create a personal account to download content. Note CNKI has the very, very big China Doctoral Dissertations Full-text Database for the Peoples Republic of China, but we do not have a subscription to that database.
  • RIM. The Research in Ministry database lists and abstracts many North American DMin dissertations before 2018. However, RIM is less complete from 2018 on. It provides NO full-text. WorldCat and ProQuest Dissertations databases include some DMin dissertations, and may eliminate the need to check RIM.

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Ebooks and Ejournals

Most databases contain ebooks and ejournals.

  • WorldCat includes records for nearly all of our ebooks.
  • Most of the ejournals available from the library are included in the journal listing. Use this resource if you want to know if a specific journal is available full-text online or in print. See How to Access Journals for a brief tutorial.

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Some libraries in the DFW area

  • Southern Methodist University. Catalog of Southern Methodist University, including Bridwell library at Perkins School of Divinity. Substantial theological collection, with stunning rare book collection.
  • Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary Library. Catalog of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth Texas. Substantial theological collection. Strongest collection of religious music, Christian education and Baptist topics in the DFW area.
  • Texas Christian University. Catalog of Texas Christian University including Brite Divinity School, Fort Worth Texas. Strong holdings in restoration movement/Churches of Christ/Disciples of Christ.

Libraries worldwide

  • Europeana offers access to digital and bibliographical resources of the 48 national libraries of Europe. It provies access to millions of cultural heritage items such as artworks, rare books, music, and videos. Content is from archives and special collections. Allows searching for title, author, subject, etc., using the Boolean operators, And, Or, and Not. ([AND] is the default operator.) Allows users to browse the resources of any country under Collections and to select more resources to search. Displays both collections searched and results by collection for any search. Links to online digital resources. Full records (available by clicking the title of the summary records) offer e-mailing and printing options. Free to all from the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL).
  • Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, and the LC catalog covers much (but not all) of what LC owns. The depth is staggering. Search for Bible passages in the subject index with entries like this: Bible Matthew V-VII (note Roman numerals). WorldCat is more complete.
  • British Library. The BL aims to collect all British publications on all topics. The public catalog does not cover the entire collection. Each record includes a note indicating whether it is available through the Document Supply Center. Searching is free but document delivery costs are quite substantial.
  • The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek includes records for all German-language publications on all topics. Some older records do not have subject headings. Open access publications can be filtered in the hit list via "Alle Standorte - Online (frei zugänglich)". Help: https://www.dnb.de/kataloghilfe
  • The University of Tübingen has the biggest collection of theological and religious literature in Germany. Click the icon that says Language to get the English language interface. There are two major limitations. First, subject headings are in German and may be skimpy. Second, some (older?) records lack subject headings. Search the Index to find an exact subject term or correct spelling for any field.
  • Bibliothèque nationale de France.
  • École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem indexes books, journal articles, and essays, most of them dealing with biblical exegesis and archaeology of the Near East, as well as the language and literature of people of the Ancient Near East. Strong in Palestine and Qumran studies. Uses a French or English interface with French subjects. Search the Library Catalog or Title field in English and examine hit records to find French subject headings. The gospel of Matthew, for example, is written "Matthieu NT". The advanced search allows you to choose a book, chapter, article, periodical, map, etc. Search indexes for author, series, or subject. The default search operator is AND. Search also with NOT and OR. The program appears to add a wildcard to the end of a search word. Add records to a cart and download or print the cart.
  • The Catholic University of Louvain library is especially strong in French language theological works.
  • Use Pontifical Biblical Institute for Italian sources; other databases are better for English, French or German works. The PBI database has an English interface. (Go to Catalogo. Then click the British flag if necessary.) However, subject headings are in Italian. Further, books of the Bible are designated by Latin names, not Italian. For example, a subject search for "Galatians," "Galaterbrief," or "Galati" (English, German, and Italian, resp.) brings up no records. The Latin is "Galatas," and this is used under Subject. Find the proper Latin form by searching for the English under Everywhere and examining the subject headings in records you retrieve. However, currently (Dec. 2020) searching the Subject field does not always work properly.
  • National library of Israel

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Library ownership: Which library owns this book?

Ever want to know if any library in the Dallas-Fort Worth area owns a given book or journal? Here is how to find out.

  • WorldCat reports items owned by thousands of libraries worldwide, including many libraries in the DFW area. Search WorldCat by author, title or subject. View a single record in detail and click the Availability accordion to see a list of libraries associated with that record. WorldCat often has more than one record for a given work. For example, there may a record for a hardback edition, another for a paperback edition, yet another for a British edition, etc. So you may need to check more than one record to determine if a local library owns what you want. Do that by consulting the Editions and Formats accordion. Click each record and then the Availability accordion to see a list of libraries that own that particular edition.

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Spanish language resources

  • SeLaDoc: La Base de datos de Teología Latinoamericana. SeLaDoc, published by the Department of Theology at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, is an index for Latin American theological and religious literature with a focus on Catholicism in the region, particularly social theology, liberation theology, ethics and religious life in Latin America. As of 2022, it contains over 90,000 records/citations. About 15 percent of the articles are available online (pick the "linked full text" option).
  • ProQuest Ebook Central. This database includes ebooks in many languages. As of 2021, it includes 100,000 in Spanish or Castilian, and over 3,000 ebooks about religion. WorldCat has links to most of these books. Our Introduction to ProQuest Ebook Central describes and explains how to use it.
  • Dialnet provides access to tables of contents to over 10,000 journals, including many Spanish language journals in humanities, social sciences, and science. Also indexes a small number of books, essays in books, and theses. Click the Journals link to look for a particular journal or to see the journal list for a particular subject area. Religion, under Humanities, lists about 300 journals. Dialnet provides access to full text for over 2,000 journals.
  • Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS) is an annotated bibliography of selected citations about Latin America published since 1936. It does not link to online content. It covers works in many languages and many topics including anthropology (archaeology and ethnology), art, geography, government and politics, history, international relations, literature, music, philosophy, political economy and sociology. There are two ways to access HLAS, and some difference in content for each.
    The older version, (https://memory.loc.gov/hlas/mdbquery.html), HLAS Online, includes all HLAS bibliographic citations since vol. 1 (1936) as well as introductory essays for vols. 1-49. This older interface has few options for limiting and refining searches and no capability to save or re-sort results.
    The newer mobile-friendly version, HLAS Web, includes citations from vol. 37 (1960s) to the present but omits introductory essays. [Essays for volumes 50-65 are available here: https://lcweb2.loc.gov/hlas/contents.html.] This search system offers sophisticated searching and allows saving, printing, emailing, and re-sorting results. Eventually the two systems will be merged.
  • CLASE. Citas Latinoamericanas en Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades covers 350,000 articles and book reviews in the social sciences and humanities including some coverage of religion. CLASE does not link to the full-text of the articles. UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) provides free access to this database. Periodica covers natural sciences.

Additional resources pointer Additional resources/cross-references: WorldCat includes citations to many Spanish Language books.

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China and Chinese language resources

  • CNKI 繁體中文. For an introduction, see CNKI中國學術期刊數據庫.
  • CNKI 简体中文
  • CNKI sells access to many Chinese language databases. DTS library users can search the entire CNKI China Academic Journals (CAJ) database. However, we have purchased access to full-text pdfs in only two series: Literature/History/Philosophy (series F), and Education/Social Sciences (series H). So this is a good source for social sciences and to a lesser degree humanities, including Chinese religion and culture, church history and missionary work in China, Christianity and culture, as well as theological and biblical studies. Most of the articles are written from a secular perspective. The two series contain full-text articles from over 3,000 journals dating back to as early as 1932. The CAJ database is updated monthly. See our English language introduction to CNKI Chinese database.
  • 華藝 Airiti ejournals and 華藝電子書 Airiti ebooks. Airity offers access to journal articles, conference proceedings, theses, and ebooks. Most content is in the Chinese language. To select the search interface language, use the dropdown "Language" list in the upper right corner of the screen. The advanced search allows searching with logical operators (between fields). Some records have only Chinese keywords, some have English, and some have both. Combine Chinese and English search terms with an OR operator for complete results. It covers a wide range of topics, especially sciences, with limited coverage of religion. For example an advanced search on 12/28/2020 for << 加拉太书 OR Galatians >> in separate fields (加拉太书 is “Galatians” in Chinese) brought up 8 journal articles, 0 conference proceedings, and 2 theses. A search for << 基督 >> ("Christ") brought up 9,247 journal articles, 15 conference proceedings, 885 theses, and 223 ebooks. Export bibliography if desired. Download full text for free if DTS has paid for that content. Otherwise pay by creating an account using Sign Up on the gray bar. See the online Userguide for more detail instructions.
    (華藝線上圖書館)提供電子期刊文章,會議論文,學位論文和電子書的使用。大多數內容是中文。 選擇檢索界面語言,請使用屏幕右上角 "語言" 下拉菜單。 進階檢索功能允許(在欄位之間)使用邏輯運算符來作檢索。 有些記錄的關鍵字只有中文,有些只有英文,也有的兩者兼有。 所以,要用OR運算符將中文和英文詞結合起來檢索,以獲得完整的結果。華藝涵蓋的主題廣泛,尤其是科學,但宗教内容有限。例如,在12/28/2020對 "加拉太书 OR Galatians" 所作的進階檢索, 結果中有8篇期刊文章,0篇會議論文集,2篇碩博士論文。查詢 "基督" ("Christ") 共有9,247 篇期刊文章,15篇會議論文,885篇碩博士論文,223本電子書。用户可以根据需要,輸出檢索結果中的書目。如果是DTS已付費的内容,用户可以免費下載全文。否則,請用灰色欄上的 "加入會員" 功能建立個人帳戶,自行購買。 欲知詳情,請參見使用說明
  • Taiwanese PhD Dissertations and Masters Theses cites and abstracts theses and dissertations (TD) on all topics. As of Feb 2022, it lists 1.3 million works, of which over 600,000 are available full-text online. It provides some coverage for Christian theology and ministry, but not a lot. Users must create a personal account on the website before they can download pdfs of the TD. Most TD are written in the Chinese language, but some are in English. Many metadata records provide titles and abstracts in both Chinese and English. The search engine provides simple query and advanced query. Advanced queries can use operators. You can also browse subject topics, but there is no controlled vocabulary lookup feature. The scope of the keyword query is too broad. It is necessary to use multiple keywords to narrow the search scope, or to search again within the scope of the preliminary search results. You can set the query mode in this system, and you can also set the language, full-text type, such as electronic full-text, and subject, graduation year, etc., to narrow the scope of the query. For details, please see: https://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/gs32/nclcdr/Operating/1-1.html

    臺灣博碩士論文知識加值系統 是臺灣國家圖書館免費供大眾使用之學位論文線上服務。臺灣國家圖書館為臺灣唯一之學位論文法定寄存圖書館,是·臺灣最重要的學術支援網站之一。該系統共收集自1956年·以來發表的學位論文,包括全文論文:608986 筆、書目與摘要:1294795 筆(02/15/2022)。該系統共收集宗教學位全文論文超過1300筆,包括基督教神學、聖經研究、教會事工、主日學、心理諮詢、婚姻家庭輔導方面的全文論文。大部分論文為中文,但也有用英文、日文或其它語言寫的論文。所有論文都有英文名稱和摘要。用戶必須在網站建立個人帳號才可以下載全文。 臺灣博碩士論文知識加值系統提供簡易查詢,進階查詢。進階查詢可以使用操作符。您也可以瀏覽學科主題,但該系統沒有受控詞彙查詢功能。關鍵詞查詢範圍太廣,需要使用使用多個關鍵詞以縮小搜索範圍,或在初步搜尋的結果範圍內再查詢。您可以在該系統設定查詢模式,也可以設定語言,全文類型,如電子全文,並學科,畢業學年度等,以縮小查詢範圍。詳細請見: https://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/gs32/nclcdr/Operating/1-1.html
  • The China Historical Christian Database (CHCD) provides historical data about Christianity in China. The website describes CHCD as follows. "It quantifies and visualizes the place of Christianity in modern China (1550-1950). It provides users the tools to discover where every Christian church, school, hospital, orphanage, publishing house, and the like were located in China, and it documents who worked inside those buildings, both foreign and Chinese. Collectively, this information creates spatial maps and generates relational networks that reveal where, when, and how Western ideas, technologies, and practices entered China. Simultaneously, it uncovers how and through whom Chinese ideas, technologies, and practices were conveyed to the West. This project breaks new ground in providing quantifiable data about modern Sino-Western relations. Its intuitive interface generates visualizations, lists, and maps for use by the general public, students and teachers in secondary education and colleges, in the US and globally, with English and Chinese navigation. Advanced DH users have open access to its data for elaboration." The Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University provides free access to this resource.

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Arabic language resources

  • المسبار العربي للبحث. OCLC's Arabic Discovery Catalog is based on a subset of WorldCat. It is limited to Arabic language resources, and the interface supports searches in Arabic script. 1.4 million metadata records are entirely in Arabic. However, an additional 1.5 million metadata records contain multi-lingual records (i.e., each record has Arabic mixed with some other language). Often this mixture happens when a book in Arabic is cataloged by a library which supports mostly non-Arabic people. In such cases, the author and title fields of the records are in Arabic, but the subject headings and notes are in English or some other non-Arabic language. The link above defaults to an English language interface. But note the option at the bottom of the screen to switch to Arabic.
  • MENATE (Middle East and North Africa Association for Theological Education) is developing a small collection of online resources to support Christian theological education as described here: Menate Digital Library. As of Sept, 2024, the actual database is incomplete and available in trial mode only. English interface to Menate and Arabic interface to Menate. The software used by Menate is provided by Al Manhal. Al Manhal has a large database of Arabic langauge works that cover all subject areas. Al Manhal.

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