| This study explores whether or not cocitation analysis is an effective tool for mapping the formal intellectual structure of biblical studies. While there is general consensus among biblical scholars on how the field is organized, there is considerable debate about the actual relationship between various competing methodologies. This study seeks to learn to what degree there is congruence between the structure that bibliometric analysis yields and the published self-analyses of the discipline.; Cocitation data were collected and analyzed using four units of analysis--authors, journals, monographs, and terms. The sources of the data were two databases: Arts & Humanities Search (the on-line version of Arts & Humanities Citation Index) on Dialog and ATLA Religion Database on CD-ROM. Two multivariate analyses were used to create two-dimensional maps---cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling. An additional multivariate technique, factor analysis, was used to determine additional structure.; This research extends cocitation research from the sciences and social sciences to the humanities, where only a few studies have been undertaken. It also marks one of the first times that multiple units of analysis have been studied in the same academic discipline, discloses to what extent such multiple measures reveal a more richly textured subject terrain than is in the published self-portrayals of biblical scholars, and determines the distinctive contribution of each set of cooccurrance data. This extensive domain analysis also expands cooccurance studies beyond single language databases, which are primarily English in the sciences, to the multiple language databases which characterize scholarship in the humanities. |
