Contemporary developments in Baha'i studies:
An examination using citation analysis

by Seena Fazel

published in Occasional Papers in Shaykhí, Bábí and Bahá'í Studies, 7:1
2003-01

Abstract

The last decade has been an eventful time in Bahá'í 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-Bahá'í religions in 1997-2001 are compared with ten and twenty years previously. Over the last decade, the number of articles being published in non-Bahá'í 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 Bahá'í Studies Review. The most cited books are those published by university presses or in Kalimat Press' Studies in the Babi and Bahá'í Religion series. These findings are discussed in relation to some of the other developments in Bahá'í studies.

 

Introduction

The last ten years has been an eventful time in Bahá'í studies. Positive developments include the wider availability of Bahá'í primary and secondary sources on the internet,[2] the development of a bibliographic guide to academic Bahá'í studies,[3] and the publication of a number of academic monographs on the Babi-Bahá'í religions by leading university presses.[4] On the other hand, there have been some notable setbacks. These include the delay in publishing any of the Bahá'í encyclopedia project,[5] the occasional use of scholarly internet discussion lists for non-scholarly purposes, and a handful of Bahá'í researchers who had 'public' disagreements with Bahá'í institutional representatives over the nature of their internet postings. With all this activity, what has happened to the actual work in Bahá'í studies? This paper reports on trends in Bahá'í studies using the method of citation analysis.

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.[6]

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.

 

Methods

Sources

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 Bahá'í Studies (H-Net Academic Consortium, Michigan State University) and The Bahá'í Studies Review (BSR) [London, UK]; iii) and correspondence with Bahá'í librarians and bibliophiles.[7]

 

Criteria for citations

References and footnotes in articles were inspected and citations counted to secondary Bahá'í literature. References to an author's non-Bahá'í 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 editors only received citations if their work was part of a wider analytic study, which may have included, for instance, a commentary and translation of primary Bahá'í text. Full details of these methods are found in a previous paper.[8]

 

Journals

Two measures of journal citation were used. First, the 'impact factor' adjusts for bias arising from the unequal number of articles published in different journals. It is derived by dividing the number of times a journal was cited by the number of articles it has published.[9] It excludes any self-citations from its analysis. In this study, the five-year journal impact factor[10] was used, which was calculated for Journal X by:

 

A = citations in 2000 and 2001 to articles published in Journal X during 1996-2000

B = number of articles published in Journal X during 1996-2000

C = A/B = five-year impact factor

 

In addition, the 'uncitedness index' was calculated which determines how many articles published in a particular journal did not receive a single citation during 2000-2001.[11] For this measure, self-citations are not excluded. It was worked out for Journal X in the following way:

 

A = total number of articles of Journal X cited at least once in 2000-2001

B = total number of articles of Journal X since it began publication[12]

      C = 100 - (A/B*100) = uncitedness index

 

Statistical methods

All proportions were tested using standard chi-squared tests, and p values cited.

 

Results

Bahá'í journals

Table 1 summarises the output of Bahá'í journals by the sex of the articles' authors for the periods 1996-2001. Table 1 also contains information on the number of articles in each of the periodicals covered. 12 articles were included from non-Bahá'í periodicals compared with 25 in 1988-93. Of the Bahá'í journals, WO published the most articles, and 46 (35%) of all journal articles on the Bahá'í Faith appeared there. 46% (16/35) of JBS articles were written by women compared with 28% (13/46) female authorship for WO and 13% (3/23) female authorship in BSR, differences that were not significant on statistical testing.[13] Female authorship was 31% in 1978-83 and 21% in 1988-93.[14] Changes in female authorship over these three time periods were not significant (c²₂=2.0, p=0.4).

Table 2 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.[15] These differences were significant, and the BSR had the highest impact factor. Table 3 reports the uncitedness index the proportion of articles in a journal that have never been cited. These results were very significant on statistical testing (p<0.0001), and the BSR was the least uncited journal.

 

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 short publication in the period was Stephen Lambden's 'Sinaitic Mysteries' published in Studies in Honor of the Late Hasan M. Balyuzi with 5 citations. Table 5 lists the ten most cited writers during 1997-2001, and provides a comparison with their relative positions during 1988-93 and 1978-83. Eight of the authors were based in the British Isles when they produced their works. The most cited women are Susan Stiles Maneck and Margit Warburg each with 8 citations.

TABLE 1

Female authorship of Bahá'í journals

1996-2001	JBS	WO	BSR	H-Bahá'í	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

 

 

TABLE 2

Impact Factors for Bahá'í Journals, 1996-2000

	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

Uncitedness index for Bahá'í journals

	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

Most cited Bahá'í publications

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 Bahá'í Religions: From Messianic Shi'ism to a World Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer¯sity 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

Most cited authors

	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	-

 

Conclusions

 

Citation analysis is just one way of examining trends in Bahá'í studies. It does not reflect what material is most 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 Bahá'í Faith for academic audiences, and does so in a relatively objective way.

 

Journals

There has been a halving of articles on the Bahá'í Faith in non-Bahá'í periodicals since 1988-93. Part of this may be secondary to the success of the Bahá'í journals, and one Bahá'í academic has suggested that potentially interesting articles may have been drawn out of mainstream or core journals in various fields as a consequence.[17] There has also been a reduction of articles since the 1980s on the persecution of the Bahá'ís in Iran and the house of worship in New Dehli.[18] The real reasons may well be more complex. Whatever they may be, it is important that Bahá'í academics continue to publish in non-Bahá'í settings.

Compared to 1988-93, the number of papers per year published by each of the Bahá'í 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.[19] The BSR remained at 3-4 papers per year. The citation analyses demonstrate that the BSR remains the most cited journal, a similar finding to 1988-93. These differences are also borne out by looking at the bibliography to standard reference works such as A Concise Encyclopedia of the Bahá'í Faith[20] and A Resource Guide to the Scholarly Study of the Bahá'í Faith.[21] It would not appear to be a resource issue, in that both JBS and WO have full-time paid editors, while the BSR has been edited on a voluntary basis. The long delays between WO issues in the late 1980s and early 1990s may have undermined its credibility. JBS's reputation may have suffered from reprinting articles from elsewhere. Van den Hoonaard has noted the different orientations of these journals, and that the BSR is the most accommodating to current academic methodologies may be relevant.[22] The difference in impact factors between these journals is not explained by number of subscribers – JBS has the largest subscription base. This paper also shows that, over the last decade, JBS and WO have become increasingly uncited, although their impact factors have not changed much since 1998-93.[23] In terms of citations to Bahá'í periodicals in non-Bahá'í journals, unlike 1988-93 where there were very few,[24] the situation has changed, and JBS and BSR both received citations in religious studies, sociology, and Middle East studies journals.

 

Women

The relative contribution of women to Bahá'í studies has not changed notably. In 1997-2001, 27% of the articles on the Babi-Bahá'í religions in Bahá'í and non-Bahá'í 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 Bahá'í Encyclopedia project that was 27%.[25] How does this compare to the non-Bahá'í situation? Information is available on the proportion of women in the academic workforce in different fields – for example, in the US in 1995, women formed 40% of the workforce in anthropology, 39% in psychology, 36% in sociology, 21% in science and engineering, and 15% in economics.[26]

 

Books

A striking finding is the success of Kalimat Press' series, Studies in the Babi and Bahá'í 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 Bahá'í faith'[27] is endorsed by this study.

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.[28] The enduring value of Peter Smith's introduction is significant, and this may partly be due to sociological analysis of the worldwide growth and development of Bahá'í communities that is included there.[29] Balyuzi's book on Bahá'u'lláh remains the only comprehensive biography of the founder of the Bahá'í Faith.

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-Bahá'í 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 Bahá'í 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.[30]

            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 Bahá'í Library website periodically publishes statistics. In the months of July 2001 and September 2002, most of the top five downloaded articles were on Bahá'í theology, with articles by Chris Buck on native messengers of God and Moojan Momen on fundamentalism featuring prominently.[31] However, the most downloaded piece is an unpublished article by Robert Stockman on Islam that is part of the curriculum of a distance learning course, the Wilmette Institute. A couple of years earlier in May and December 1999, the most downloaded articles were a critical look at Bahá'í perspectives on Christianity, one by Susan Maneck on women, and a philological and theological analysis by Stephen Lambden.[32] It is interesting to compare this with online journals where, for example, in medicine, the most downloaded articles are educational overviews, editorials, and current reviews of treatment literature.[33] Bahá'í articles linked to the world's most visited websites will most probably have been downloaded more often.

 

Authors

Van den Hoonaard has proposed the presence of several distinctive scholarly clusters in Bahá'í 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 Bahá'í agencies (such as the Bahá'í Chairs at Maryland and Jerusalem). [34] The ascendancy of those individuals who are part of the British Newcastle-upon-Tyne/Lancaster cluster appears to have been confirmed over the last twenty years. Compared to a decade ago, William Hatcher and Douglas Martin have fallen off the list of most cited authors, mainly due to their introductory book on the Bahá'í Faith not sustaining its initial impact. The new entrants are Stockman and Amanat, historians trained at Harvard and Oxford respectively.

 

Themes

The impression from this citation analysis is that Middle East studies and history are the most prominent subjects in academic Bahá'í studies. As van den Hoonaard notes, the long-lasting impact of Nabil Zarandi's The Dawn 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 Bahá'í Studies.'[35] In a previous paper, a prediction was made that applying the Bahá'í teachings and correlating to the needs of current society would start to feature more prominently in Bahá'í studies.[36] This paper has demonstrated that material on these themes has not made any impact in the academic literature on the Bahá'í Faith, and no works in the field of peace studies, socio-economic development, or women's studies have featured in this citation analysis. The anticipated 'new turn in Bahá'í studies'[37] does not appear to have materialized.

           

Future directions

What direction might this new turn take? Two areas of Bahá'í scholarship appear to offer promising possibilities. The first is empirical studies of contemporary challenges to the Bahá'í community. The Bahá'í 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 Bahá'í education of children, social and economic development, and the participation of women in Bahá'í community life are potentially interesting areas of enquiry. The second area that Bahá'í studies may turn to is the Bahá'í 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 21^st century to believe in religion? What makes people happy? What is the Bahá'í response to the New Age movement? Many more subjects await further work.

 

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Notes