Buddhist-Christian Scholarship and the World Wide Web

Abstract

The Internet and the World Wide Web have had an enormous effect on academic scholarship by transforming the way scholars conduct research and publish its results. But for some, the ease of access to information offered by the Web is more than offset by the difficulty of identifying which Web research resources and publications are authoritative and which are not. Before the Web, high-quality scholarship could be easily identified because it appeared in carefully edited books and peer-reviewed journals produced by recognized publishers and collected by academic libraries. This is still the case, of course, but the Web now offers a parallel universe of research resources largely lacking the same identifying marks of quality and authority. In an effort to provide some guidance in navigating this realm, which still feels much more like the wild frontier than a library, I will attempt to list some of the basic Web resources in Buddhist and Christian scholarship and provide some guidelines for locating authoritative material beyond the basic sources. I will list the websites mentioned in the following paragraphs with their Web addresses (also called uniform resource locators, or URLs) at the end of this article. Beginning with resources for both Christian and Buddhist scholarship, researchers in religious studies should be familiar with the ATLA Religion Database, which includes the American Theological Library Association's print indexes Religion Index One, Religion Index Two, and Index to Book Reviews in Religion. Indexing journals and book collections of essays, but not monographs, it has proven to be an indispensable tool. However, it goes back only to 1949, and therefore other indexes would need to be consulted. During the course of the previous century, Western philosophers became more aware of the great philosophers of Asia. This is reflected in the Philosopher's Index, a tool that indexes journal articles, essays, and monographs. Its coverage goes back to 1940. A more specialized index, the Buddhist-Christian Studies Database (BCSD), is available as a free site. As its editor, I welcome any citation submissions for published articles, essays, and books as well as unpublished conference papers. Any papers residing on a stable website can be linked to BCSD in order to provide