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The last decade has been an eventful time in Baha’i studies. This paper will investigate contemporary developments using the technique of citation analysis, a widely used method to report trends in academia. Citations in academic literature on the Babi-Baha’i religions in 1997-2001 are compared with ten and twenty years previously. Over the last decade, the number of articles being published in non-Baha’i periodicals has halved. The proportion of women writers is 27% - a similar finding to 10 years previously. The most cited journal, using impact factor and uncitedness data, is the Baha’i Studies Review. The most cited books are those published by university presses or in Kalimat Press’ Studies in the Babi and Baha’i Religion series. These findings are discussed in relation to some of the other developments in Baha’i studies.
The last ten years has been an eventful time in Baha’i studies. Positive developments include the wider availability of Baha’i primary and secondary sources on the Internet,
Citation analysis is a widely used tool in academia to assess the impact of scholarly output and trends in scholarship in a particular field by tracking references in the footnotes and bibliography of academic articles. Citation analysis is considered to be more objective than qualitative judgments, which are prone to bias and favoritism. It is therefore widely used to rate academic journals, departments, and individual researchers for external assessments, including grant proposals.
This paper reports a citation analysis on articles in English about the Bahá’í Faith published in major Bahá’í and other journals during 1997-2001, and compares them with similar citation analyses ten and twenty years ago. I aimed to identify: i) the most cited journals, books,and authors; ii) any changes in such citation patterns between the three time periods; iii) the contribution of female authors to Bahá’í studies; iv) any emerging trends in the content of Bahá’í studies.
Citations were manually searched in articles on the Bábí-Bahá’í religions published during the years 1997-2001 in two sources: i) non-Bahá’í journals listed in multi-disciplinary bibliographic indexes using the keywords “Babi*” and “Bahai*” (e.g. Religion Index, Index Islamicus, Econlit, Philosopher’s Index, ATLA Religion Database); ii) the following Bahá’í journals: World Order (WO) [Wilmette, USA], The Journal of Bahá’í Studies (JBS) [Ottawa, Canada], Occasional Papers in Shaykhi, Babi and Baha’i Studies (H-Net Academic Consortium, Michigan State University) and The Bahá’í Studies Review (BSR) [London, UK]; iii) and correspondence with Baha’i librarians and bibliophiles.
References and footnotes in articles were inspected and citations counted to secondary Bahá’í literature. References to an author’s non-Baha’i work did not count, so that,for example, Moojan Momen’s An Introduction to Shi‘i Islam was not included. As per standard methods, only original papers and research notes were included in the analyses, and therefore books, chapters in books, monographs, book reviews, commentaries, editorials, and essays in journals were omitted. Joint authorship yielded one citation to each author. Translators and editorsonly received citations if their work was part of a wider analytic study, which may have included, for instance, a commentary and translation of primary Baha’i text. Full details of these methods are found in a previous paper.
A = citations in 2000and 2001 to articles published in Journal X during 1996-2000
A = total number ofarticles of Journal X cited at least once in 2000-2001
Statistical methods
Table2 reports the impact factors (the number of times a journal was cited per article it published x 100%) of three Bahá’í journals during 1996-2000.
Bahá’í books and writers
Table 4 lists the most cited books in Bahá’í and other journals during 1997-2001, and compares them to their 1988-93 ranking. Only Modernity and Millennium was published after 1997 and, therefore, may have been disadvantaged by a shorter duration of potential citation than the other leading books. Major non-Bahá’í academic publishing houses published four of the top books. The most cited article or shortpublication in the period was Stephen Lambden’s “Sinaitic Mysteries” publishedin Studies in Honor of the Late Hasan M. Balyuzi with 5 citations
TABLE 1
1996-2001 | JBS | WO | BSR | H-Baha’i | Other[16] | Total |
| | | | | | |
No. female authors | 16 (46%) | 13 (28%) | 3 (13%) | 1 (7%) | 2 (17%) | 35 (27%) |
Total no. articles | 35 (100%) | 46 (100%) | 23 (100%) | 15 (100%) | 12 (100%) | 131 (100%) |
c23=6.9;0.05<p<0.10
TABLE 2
| JBS | WO | BSR |
2000/01 citations | 5 | 1 | 5 |
No. articles 1996-2000 | 31 | 37 | 16 |
Impact Factor | 22% | 3% | 32% |
c22=6.2;p=0.04
TABLE 3
| JBS | WO | BSR |
No. articles cited 2000-01 | 12 | 7 | 10 |
Total no. articles | 140 | 340 | 46 |
Uncitedness index | 91% | 98% | 78% |
c22=27.4;p<0.0001
TABLE 4
Total no. citations (less self-citations) 1988-93 ranking | |||
1 | Amanat, Abbas. Resurrection and Renewal. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989. | 14 | 10 |
2= | Balyuzi, Hasan. Bahá’u’lláh: The King of Glory. Oxford: George Ronald, 1980. | 11 | 2 |
2= | Smith, Peter. The Babi and Baha’i Religions: From Messianic Shi‘ism to a World Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. | 11 | 1 |
4 | From Iran East and West: Studies in Bábí and Bahá’í History, volume 2. Eds. J Cole and M Momen. Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1986. | 10 | - |
5= | Cole, Juan. Modernity and Millennium. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. | 7 | - |
5= | Studies in Honor of the Late Hasan M. Balyuzi. Studies in the Bábí and Bahá’í Religions, volume 5. Ed. M Momen. Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1988. | 7 | 4 |
7= | Buck, Christopher. Symbol and Secret. Studies in Bábí and Bahá’í History, volume 6. Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1995. | 6 | - |
7= | Momen, Moojan, ed. The Bábí and Bahá’í Religions, 1844-1944: Some Contemporary Western Accounts. Oxford: George Ronald, 1981. | 6 | 7 |
7= | In Iran: Studies in Bábí and Bahá’í History, volume 3. Ed. P Smith. Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1986. | 6 | 10 |
10= | Browne, Edward Granville, comp. Materials for the Study of the Babi Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918. | 5 | 6 |
10= | Taherzadeh, Adib. The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh. Vol. 2. Oxford: George Ronald, 1977. | 5 | - |
TABLE 5
| Author | No. citations (less self-citations) | 1988-93 ranking | 1978-83 ranking |
1 | M. Momen | 35 | 1 | 5 |
2= | J. Cole | 26 | 7 | - |
2= | P. Smith | 26 | 4 | 10 |
4 | H. Balyuzi | 22 | 2 | 2 |
5 | E. Browne | 16 | 3 | 1 |
6= | A. Amanat | 14 | - | - |
6= | S. Lambden | 14 | 10 | - |
6= | R. Stockman | 14 | - | - |
9 | D. MacEoin | 13 | 5 | 6 |
10 | A. Taherzadeh | 10 | 6 | - |
Citation analysis is just one way of examining trends in Baha’i studies. It does not reflect what material ismost useful for teaching and training purposes, nor does it assume that the most cited work is that of superior intellectual merit. It quantifies what has been found to be useful by those writing on the Baha’i Faith for academic audiences, and does so in a relatively objective way.
Journals
There has been a halving of articles on the Baha’i Faith in non-Baha’i periodicals since 1988-93. Part ofthis may be secondary to the success of the Baha’i journals, and one Baha’i academic has suggested that potentially interesting articles may have been drawn out of mainstream or core journals in various fields as a consequence.
Compared to 1988-93, the number of papers per year published by each of the Baha’i journals has changed. In 1988-1993, JBS published 14 articles per year. In the period 1997-2001, this had reduced to 5. WO doubled its output from 4 to 8 articles per year.
Women
The relative contribution of women to Baha’i studies has not changed notably. In 1997-2001, 27% of the articles on the Babi-Baha’i religions in Baha’i and non-Baha’i academic periodicals were written by women. In 1988-93, it was 21% and in 1978-83 it was 31%. This is similar to the proportion of women who have written those articles “likely to find their way” in the Baha’i Encyclopedia project that was 27%.
Books
A striking finding is the success of Kalimat Press’ series, Studiesin the Babi and Baha’i Religions. Four of the nine most cited books are published by Kalimat. Frank Lewis’ view that Kalimat “has proven itself the most important and long-standing forum for the academic study of the Baha’i Faith”
Academic presses disproportionately feature. Abbas Amanat’s Resurrection and Renewal is the most cited book. Part of its success may be in that it is the only academically informed introduction to the Babi movement, and provides an overview of the social history of Qajar Iran.
Overall, however, the level of citations that these works are attracting is not particularly high, and therefore attention should not be paid to the relative differences in ranking. Of note is that anti-Baha’i polemical works do not feature among the most cited works, and the English-speaking academic community, at least, does not appear to take these works seriously.
The overall low level of citations is indicative of ongoing challenges that the Baha’i scholarly community faces. Many academically inclined works make no mention of relevant background literature, let alone build on them. This approach is unscholarly, and may reflect an arrogance and anti-intellectualism that requires addressing.
Citation analysis does not necessarily identify material that has been useful for teaching or external affairs purposes. An alternative approach is to list the most downloaded articles from the Internet. Information is not widely available, most papers can be downloaded from multiple sites, but the Baha’i-Library.org website periodically publishes statistics. In the months of July 2001 and September 2002, most of the top five downloaded articles were on Baha’i theology, with articles by Chris Buck on native messengers of God and Moojan Momen on fundamentalism featuring prominently.
Authors
Van den Hoonaard has proposed the presence of several distinctive scholarly clusters in Baha’i studies, characterized by a preference of methods, choice of subject matter, discourse, and, sometimes, geography. These include British, American, mainland European, Canadian and formally-established Baha’i agencies (such as the Baha’i Chairs at Maryland and Jerusalem).
Themes
The impression from this citation analysis is that MiddleEast studies and history are the most prominent subjects in academic Baha’istudies. As van den Hoonaard notes, the long-lasting impact of Nabil Zarandi’s TheDawn Breakers and the historical work of Shoghi Effendi is significant: “It is not so much the standard, but the very presence of their works that has given a preeminent place to history and Middle Eastern Studies as touchstones of serious Baha’i Studies.”
Future directions
What direction might this new turn take? Two areas of Baha’i scholarship appear to offer promising possibilities. The first is empirical studies of contemporary challenges to the Baha’i community. The Baha’i community has gathered a vast experience in certain matters, and scholarship is one way to systematize and disseminate this accumulated knowledge. The nature of pioneering, growth trends, interracial marriage, the integration of Persian refugees, the Baha’i education of children, social and economic development, and the participation of women in Baha’i community life are potentially interesting areas of enquiry. The second area that Baha’i studies may turn to is the Baha’i response to contemporary problems. What are the problems with globalization? What are the limits to freedom? What does the economic and political integration of Europe imply for the concept of the unity of humankind? Why is it reasonable in the 21st century to believe in religion? What makes people happy? What is the Baha’i response to the New Age movement? Many more subjects await further work.
[1] Formerly co-editor of the Baha’i Studies Review (until May 2002).
[2] H-Bahai for primary texts and the Baha’i Academics Resource Library for secondary literature have been leading examples (at
[3] R Stockmanand J Winters, A resource guide to the scholarly study of the Baha’i Faith(6th ed. Wilmette: Baha’i Publishing Trust, 1997) on
[4] See, e.g.,Christopher Buck, Paradise and Paradigm: Key Symbols in Persian Christianity and the Baha’i Faith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999);Juan R.I. Cole, Modernity and the Millennium: the Genesis of the Baha'iFaith in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1998); Michael McMullen, The Baha’i: the religious costruction of aglobal identity (Rutgers University Press, 2000); and Will van den Hoonaard, The Origins of the Baha’i Community of Canada 1898-1948(Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1996).
[5]
[6] For a widerdiscussion of the pros and cons of citation analysis, see S Fazel and J Danesh, “Baha’i scholarship: an examination by citation analysis,” Baha’i StudiesReview 5.1 (1995): 13-26 (
[7] Most of therelevant papers found in these databases are listed in Baha’i Studies Review8 (1998): 115-117 and Baha’i Studies Review 10 (2001/2): 179-182.
[8] Fazel andDanesh, “Baha’i Scholarship.”
[13] H-Bahai and“Other” were combined for this analysis.
[14] Fazel and Danesh, “Baha’i scholarship.”
[15]
[16] Articles in non-Baha’i academic periodicals.
[17] Will van den Hoonaard, “Unfreezing the frame.”
[18] For numbers of articles involved, see S. Fazel, “The Baha’i Faith and academic journals,” Baha’i Studies Review 3.2 (1993): 81-90.
[19] In 1997-2001, there were changes to the editorial boards of JBS and WO.
[20] This work cites 6 articles from the BSR, 3 from WO, and 2 from JBS. 10 are cited from Baha’i Studies Bulletin (ed. S. Lambden and published in 1982-1992). The Encyclopedia is written by Peter Smith (Oxford: Oneworld, 2002).
[21] Only 19% ofBSR articles are uncited in the 1997 (and latest) edition of the Resource Guide.
[22] Will van den Hoonaard, “Unfreezing the frame: the promise of inductive research in Baha’i studies,” Baha’i Studies Review 10 (2001/2002): 103-114
[23] For aparticular journal, impact factors from 1988-93 are not strictly comparable tothe ones in 1997-2001 as the baseline number of articles covered was more in 1998-93 (168 articles) compared to the 131 papers in the latter time period.
[24] Fazel andDanesh, “Baha’i Scholarship.”
[25] Will van den Hoonaard, “The social organization of mentorship in Baha’i studies,” Journalof Baha’i Studies 8.3 (1998): 19-38.
[26] NationalResearch Council, From Scarcity to Visibility: Gender differences in the careers of doctoral scientists and engineers (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2001).
[27] Franklin Lewis, Review of “Studies in Honor of the Late Hasan M. Balyuzi, ed. M. Momen,”Iranian Studies 32 (1999): 145-148. Lewis adds, “Kalimat’s dedication to providing scholars of the Baha’i Faith a forum to present their research, despite the commercial and communal problems encountered in the process, is greatly to be admired.”
[28] “A standard source for the study of Babism, Qajar Iran, and religious movements in the Islamic world” is the view of F. Kazemi in the International Journal of Middle East Studies 23 (1991): 408-9.
[30] Peter Khan and Udo Schaefer have noted this unfortunate tendency in Baha’i communities. See P Khan, “Some aspects of Baha’i scholarship,” JBS 9.4 (1999): 43-64; U. Schaefer, “Challenges to Baha’i studies,” BSR 2.1 (1992): 25-32.
[31] In September 2002, the most downloaded articles were by K. Khavari, “Marriage and the nuclear family” Baha’i Studies Notebook 3.1/2 (289 downloads that month); C. Buck, “Native messengers,” BSR 6 (216); R. Landau, “Environment”(157); M. Momen, “Fundamentalism and liberalism,” BSR 2.1 (144); Fazel and Fananapazir, “Interpretation,” BSR 2.1 (122). In July 2001, the top five were: Buck, “Native messengers” (206 downloads); L. Abdo, “Female representations,”BSR 4.1 (191); Momen, “Fundamentalism,” (160); Stevens and Lewis, “Persian refugees” (131); A-M Ghadirian, “Human responses to life stress,” Baha’i Studies Notebook 3.1/2 (124). This information is available on the Baha’i Library website under “Statistics” – for the BSR articles, one needs to add the number of downloads from the “published articles” part of the website to the number from the BSR section that is mirrored on the Baha’i Library.
[32] In December 1999, the most downloaded articles were by F. Beckwith, “Baha’i-Christian dialogue,” (53 downloads that month); S. Lambden, “The word ‘Baha’” BSR 3.1(31); S. Maneck, “Women and the Baha’i Faith” (31). In May 1999, the most downloaded articles were by S. Maneck, “Women ” (38); F. Beckwith,“Baha’i-Christian,” (33); S. Lambden, “The word ‘Baha’” (21).
[33] See, e.g., BritishMedical Journal 325 (2002):1428.
[34] van den Hoonaard, “Unfreezing the frame.”
[35] van den Hoonaard, “The social organization of mentorship.”
[36] Fazel and Danesh, “Baha’i scholarship.”
[37] van den Hoonaard, “The social organization of mentorship.”
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