Atla Religion Database

Atla Religion Database
Producer	American Theological Library Association (United States)
Access
Providers	EBSCO
Cost	Subscription
Coverage
Disciplines	Theology, religious studies
Format coverage	Journal articles, essays, book reviews
Temporal coverage	1949–present, with retrospective indexing for some journals back to the nineteenth century
Geospatial coverage	Global
No. of records	Over 2.1 million
Update frequency	Monthly
Links
Website	www.atla.com/products/prodinfo/Pages/ATLA-RDB.aspx
Title list(s)	www.atla.com/products/titles/Pages/default.aspx

The Atla Religion Database (ATLA RDB) is an index of academic journal articles in the area of religion.^[1] It is updated monthly^[2] and published by the American Theological Library Association. The database indexes articles, essays, and book reviews related to a wide range of scholarly fields related to religion. The database is available on a subscription basis through a database aggregator.

The total database includes over 3.0 million article citations from over 2,400+ journals.^[3] There are more than a quarter of a million essay citations from more than 18,000 multi-author works. The number of book reviews is over half a million.^[4] Atla indexes multi-author works, such as Festschriften and conference proceedings, with separate records for each essay.

Formats

The Atla Religion Database, formerly available on CD-ROM, is a MARC record format database^[5] that incorporates several out-of-print indexes, including Religion Index One: Periodicals, Religion Index Two: Multi-Author Works, and Index to Book Reviews in Religion.^[1]

Coverage

The database indexes scholarly works on major world religions.^[6] There are, however, selection criteria for inclusion according to scholarly merit and scope. More than 60 languages are represented. Some records cover articles as far back as the 19th century. Atla claims full coverage for core journals back to 1949.

In 1996 Susan Smailes' masters thesis criticized Atla Religion Database for under-representing the emerging fields of lesbian theology and womanist theology in its coverage.^[7]

Scholarly fields with significant degrees of coverage include:

References

^ ^a ^b Golderman, Gail; Connolly, Bruce (April 15, 2011). "Finding Religion". Library Journal. 136 (7): 120–126.
^ "ATLA Announces Monthly Updates and Major Product Enhancements". www.atla.com. Archived from the original on 2018-04-04. Retrieved 2018-04-03.
^ "Atla Religion Database® (Atla RDB®)". www.atla.com. Retrieved 2018-04-03.
^ "ATLA Religion Database". American Theological Library Association. Archived from the original on 18 July 2011. Retrieved July 31, 2011.
^ Luedtke, Tami (1998). American Theological Library Association Summary of Proceedings. Summary of Proceedings of the Annual Conference- American Theological Library Association. American Theological Library Association. pp. 243–246. ISSN 0066-0868.
^ Campbell, Cameron J. (2004). World Religions/Religious Studies in ATLA's RDB. American Theological Library Association Summary of Proceedings. Summary of Proceedings of the Annual Conference- American Theological Library Association. pp. 85–89. ISSN 0066-0868.
^ Smailes, Suzanne A. (May 1996). Reliability of Coverage of Periodical Indexing of Lesbian Theological and Womanist Theological Articles in the ATLA Religion Database (Master of Library Science thesis). Kent State University.