Bahá'í Scholarship:
An examination using citation analysis

by Seena Fazel and John Danesh

Abstract: This paper examines references of articles in major Bahá'í studies journals published during 1978-83 and 1988-93 to study trends in Bahá'í scholarship. This method, called "citation analysis," is widely-used as a quantitative tool to assess the effect of scholarly work. We found that most scholarly articles on the Bahá'í Faith are now published by North American and European journals of the Association for Bahá'í Studies, in contrast with the situation ten years ago. Women have not increased their authorship of Bahá'í studies publications during the past decade, and continue to have a marginal role in this form of scholarship. We detected potentially important differences in citation rates between Bahá'í journals: articles published in The Bahá'í Studies Review topped two citation rankings. Bahá'í theology has recently emerged as a major theme of publications, in contrast with a decade ago when history dominated the most cited list of publications.

An upsurge in academic Bahá'í activity began in the 1970s. The number of doctoral theses written in English about the Bahá'í Faith increased from merely five during the entire period before 1970 to eighteen during 1971-1985. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, the world's largest non-science bibliographic index, the number of articles on the Bahá'í Faith in non-Bahá'í journals doubled from nine during 1976- 80 to eighteen during 1986-90. The Religion Index, another bibliographic reference, documented a fourfold increase from three to twelve articles during the same periods.

Part of this trend is explained by the growing interest of non- Bahá'í academics in the religion. Scholarly stirrings within the Bahá'í community, on the other hand, were prompted by a combination of exceptional scholars, institutional directives, and the formation of formal networks of Bahá'ís interested in scholarship. The works of Hasan Balyuzi, in particular, sparked many Western Bahá'ís. The Six Year Plan (1986-92) of the Universal House of Justice stated as a target a "vast increase" in the publication and dissemination of Bahá'í literature. Another landmark was the formation of the Association of Bahá'í Studies in 1974. Its North American affiliate alone has published twenty issues of its journal, two academic monographs, and three volumes of essays since 1988. Moojan Momen, in a survey of Western academic Bahá'í scholarship, suggested, "It was not until the 1970s that the Bahá'í community grew to the extent that it could 'sustain' the luxury of a more analytical type of scholarship."

Yet, it is difficult to assess the impact of such increased scholarly output on the Bahá'í community without extensive studies (such as conducting community-wide surveys) or resorting to vague qualitative judgments. However, studying the effect of scholarship in a particular group, such as contributors to Bahá'í journals, is more readily quantifiable. Journal authors are a proxy group for segments of the community interested in Bahá'í studies. Studying the footnotes and references published in their articles is a method called "citation analysis." It is a widely-used measure of the effects of published research, especially of journal articles. Citation analysis differs from both gross publication counts, which are often misleadingly used as indicators of academic "productivity," and from qualitative analyses by experts, which are subjective, time-consuming, and expensive. Citation analysis' basic premise is that important and influential works are cited frequently by authors.

What are this measurement's strengths and weaknesses? A number of studies show that citation analyses correlate well with qualitative indicators of intellectual merit. For example, lists of most cited authors in the Science Citation Index often predict Nobel-prize winners. Citation data also correlate closely with other measures such as peer ratings, academy memberships, access to resources, and quality of higher education. A survey of 543 distinguished academics revealed that they considered their most important works to be ones that broke new ground, and which were widely cited. Hargens and Femlee's literature review concluded that "the number of citations to a scientist's work is often recommended as the best single indicator of scholarly recognition."

Similar correlations hold for academic journals: peer-reviewed journals receive significantly more citations than journals which are not peer- reviewed. Librarians and journal editors use citation ratings to gauge journals' performances. Citation analysis has influenced academia in other ways. Administrators, policy makers, and funding bodies such as Britain's University Grants Committee use it to assess grant applications. One study showed that "a substantial proportion of biochemistry, and a majority of sociology departments" in America use it as part of hiring, promotion, and salary decisions. Business administration programmes, for example, are often ranked by their faculty members' citation rates. Trend-watchers use citation data to identify emerging specialities and promising fields.

Like any quantitative measurement, citation analysis is limited by distortions which creep into inaccurate or incomplete data. Excessive self-citation, for example, can spuriously boost an author's citation rating. A citation may suggest a criticism of, rather than concurrence with, the cited paper, especially in the social sciences literature. The problem of "delayed recognition," the lag time until an important paper is noticed, contrasts with the bias of "obliteration by incorporation," the absorption of a researcher's work in a field to the extent that explicit citations are omitted. Research in the "hard" sciences receives more citations than comparable work in the social sciences which, in turn, surpasses citations in the arts and humanities. The exclusion of books from citation databases also tends to bias against the social sciences and the arts and humanities. However, failure to be cited does not necessarily mean that a paper has not been read, such as in the case of a useful didactive paper.

Hence, caution is necessary in interpreting the results of citation analysis since it reflects a distinctive dialogue within an intellectual community during a limited time. It supplements rather than replaces qualitative assessments of intellectual merit.

We have performed a citation analysis on articles in English about the Bahá'í Faith published in major Bahá'í and other journals during 1978-83 and 1988-93. We aimed to identify: i) the most cited journals, books, articles, and authors; ii) any changes in such citation patterns between the two 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

We manually searched for citations in articles on the Bábí- Bahá'í Faiths published during the years 1978-83 and 1988-93 inclusive in two sources: i) non-Bahá'í journals listed in one of four large multi-disciplinary bibliographic indexes (Arts and Humanities Citation Index [AHCI], Social Sciences Citation Index [SSCI], Religion Index, Index Islamicus:^[1] keywords "Bahá'í+" and "Babi+" were used for AHCI and SSCI); ii) the following Bahá'í journals: World Order (WO) [Wilmette, USA], The Journal of Bahá'í Studies (JBS) [Ottawa, Canada], The Bahá'í Studies Bulletin (BNB) [Newcastle, UK] and The Bahá'í Studies Review (BSR) [London, UK]. World Order issues were dated according to copyright date rather than issue date. For the 1978-83 period, the study included only World Order and the Bahá'í Studies Notebook (BSN) [Ottawa, ABS] as the other Bahá'í journals did not exist yet.

Criteria for citations

We inspected references and footnotes in articles and counted only citations to secondary Bahá'í literature. This meant, for example, that the works of Shoghi Effendi (and his edition of the Dawnbreakers) were excluded. Only citations to Bahá'í material were included. Hence, Hasan Balyuzi's Muhammad and the Course of Islam did not count as a citation. All self-citations were excluded, except in the calculation of the uncitedness index (see below). Joint authorship yielded one citation to each author.

We followed the convention of citation analysis and included only original papers and research notes in the analyses, and therefore omitted books, essays in books, monographs, book reviews, commentaries, reports (including US Senate/Congress submissions and resolutions), corrections, editorials, and poems.

Editors of volumes did not receive citations if an article in their work was cited unless the editor had done original research and analysis, such as Momen had in Some Contemporary Western Accounts. Translators did not receive citations unless their translation was part of an analytic study in the BSB. Works cited because scripture was quoted from them (for example, if an author quoted Bahá'u'lláh and cited Esslemont's Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era) did not receive a citation. Reprints did not count as citations.

Citation scores

We calculated two measures of journal citation. 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. In this study, the five-year journal impact factor was used, which was calculated for Journal X by:

We merged categories of data when this was necessary to fulfil criteria for valid chi-squared tests. Differences between proportions were assessed by significance tests with continuity corrections, and presented with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). All p values are two-tailed.

Results

Bahá'í journals

Table 1 summarises the output of Bahá'í journals by the sex of the articles' authors for the periods 1978-83 and 1988-93. 82 (49%) of all Bahá'í journal articles published during 1988-93 appeared in JBS. 35% (29/82) of such JBS articles were written by women compared with 18% (4/22) female authorship for WO and no female authorship in BSB or BSR (chi-squared=22.7, p < 0.001; columns of data for BSB, BSR, and other were merged to perform a valid chi-squared test). The percentage of female authors published in all Bahá'í journals was 31% in 1978-83 compared with 21% in 1988-93, a 10% difference which did not reach statistical significance (95% CI, -2% to 22%; p=0.12).

Table 2 reports the "impact factors" (the number of times a journal was cited per article it published x 100%) of four Bahá'í journals during 1988-92. The range of scores varied by almost an order of magnitude (5% for WO v 42% for BSR), but such large differences between the four journals failed to reach statistical significance (chi-squared=6.6, 0.05 < p < 0.10) owing to the small numbers of articles cited in any of these journals. Table 3 reports the "uncitedness index," the proportion of articles in a journal that have never been cited. The rankings are the same as in Table 2: articles published in British-based journals tended to be significantly less uncited than North American publications (chi-squared=16.5; p < 0.001). WO's uncitedness index during 1978-83 was 89%, similar to ten years later.

Other Bahá'í periodicals such as Herald of the South, The American Bahá'í, One Country, Dialogue , and the British Bahá'í Journal all received nil scores on the impact factor.

Bahá'í books, articles, and writers

Table 4 lists the most cited books in Bahá'í and other journals during 1988-93. Only Resurrection and Renewal was published after 1988 and, therefore, may have been disadvantaged by a shorter duration of potential citation than the other leading books. Three of the top six books were published by major non-Bahá'í academic publishing houses; two of these were introductory textbooks. A third introductory book, Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era, was also among the ten most cited books.

Table 5 lists the most cited articles or monographs during 1988-93. Three of the top seven articles were published in Religion, a journal of religious studies. Table 6 lists the ten most cited writers during 1988- 93, and provides a comparison with their relative positions during 1978- 83. The first six authors were all based in the British Isles when they produced their works. Edward Granville Browne and Denis MacEoin are the list's only non-Bahá'ís. The four authors who did not appear in the 1988-93 listing but who appeared ten years earlier were Robert Hayden, Louis Gregory, Alessandro Bausani, and Comte de Gobineau.

Discussion

Our study of Bahá'í journal articles found that almost 60% of such articles were published in journals of the Association of Bahá'í Studies during 1988-93 compared with only 10% ten years earlier. We found that the relative contribution of women to publications in Bahá'í studies has not increased since 1983 and may be decreasing. No women appeared among the most cited Bahá'í authors. Our citation analysis also suggests possibly important differences in the performances of various Bahá'í journals. Articles in The Bahá'í Studies Review were the most cited compared with articles in other journals, but these differences were based on a relatively small number of citations of BSR. Whereas the most cited Bahá'í books tended to be introductory texts or historical studies, the most cited articles often related to theology, a trend that may reflect a shift in the focus of scholarly enquiry (see below). We further discuss our findings below, together with their limitations and possible implications.

Journals

Pendelbury examined "uncitedness" of articles publish in journals indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) between 1981-85. He found that 93% of articles in arts and humanities journals and 48% in social science journals were not cited within five years of their publication. Our study is not strictly comparable with Pendelbury's because we counted citations in four Bahá'í journals (none of which are indexed by ISI, a database that covers only leading journals) and listings from AHCI and SSCI. Unlike Pendulbury, we did not study a five year time period after all articles' publications. If we had strictly used Pendelbury's method, all Bahá'í journals would have scored 100% on the "uncitedness" index. Only one article from World Order received a citation in journals covered in AHCI and SSCI during 1988-93, but this citation did not occur within five years of that article's publication. Since World Order restarted in 1966, only three other citations have been made to it in indexed non- Bahá'í journals (all of them in one article on Robert Hayden). Our results suggest that academic scholarship in Bahá'í journals failed to make an impression on non- Bahá'í research in the social sciences and in the arts and humanities.

Books and articles

Although several introductory books on the Bahá'í Faith received high citation counts, part of the reason for the top ranking of The Babi and Bahá'í Religions may be its inclusion of original sociological research from Peter Smith's doctoral thesis.^[2] Even journal articles that topped the list received relatively few citations. Part of this neglect of Bahá'í journal articles is probably related to the lack of an index to Bahá'í periodical materials and the difficulty of obtaining such periodicals. There are few Bahá'í libraries freely available to researchers. University libraries rarely carry Bahá'í periodicals and academic monographs. The small numbers of citations for books and articles suggests that undue emphasis should not be placed on their relative rankings.

How do the citation rankings compare with the qualitative assessments of Bahá'í scholars? Only five of the fifteen articles which received three or more citations were included in Robert Stockman's 1993 draft Curriculum Guide for the Bahá'í Faith (for university courses). Several "classics" of Bahá'í scholarship are ignored by citation data, such as Juan Cole's "Problems of Chronology in Bahá'u'lláh's Tablet of Wisdom" (the only article highlighted in Collin's profile of Bahá'í periodicals because it opened up "exciting debate") and John and Linda Walbridge's "Bahá'í Laws on the Status of Men" (referred to by Stockman as "the best research done on the Bahá'í Faith" since Cole's "Concept of Manifestation"). World Order celebrated its 20th anniversary in 1989 by reprinting four notable articles, none of which received a single citation.

Authors

One of us (SF) previously examined citations by authors in journals indexed by AHCI in 1981-93. That study, however, omitted the possibility of multiple authorship and was limited by the fact that the AHCI does not index Bahá'í periodicals or even leading Islamic studies journals. Our present, more comprehensive assessment confirms the preliminary finding that Momen, Smith, and MacEoin are the most cited living authors in Bahá'í studies. We hope to explore reasons for the under-representation of female authors in Bahá'í studies in future work.

Our findings suggest that the practice of self-citation is relatively common among Bahá'í scholars. About 17% of the citations to the leading Bahá'í authors were self-citations, a result consistent with studies reporting, on average, greater than 10% self- citation rates. This finding is unsurprising since researchers tend to build on their own work, particularly in a currently immature and narrow specialty as Bahá'í studies.

How would table 6's list of most cited authors compare with the Bahá'í community's perceptions of its most influential writers? Only a properly conducted community survey could reliably answer this question. However, the fact that three (Martin, Momen and Taherzadeh) of the eight living, most cited authors have given Hasan Balyuzi memorial lectures, a yearly recognition of distinction in scholarship awarded by the Association for Bahá'í Studies, suggests some overlap of community opinion with citation results, at least among circles interested in Bahá'í studies.

Themes and content

Articles about literary criticism, linguistics, and philosophy dominate the list of the fifty most cited works of the twentieth century in the arts and humanities.^[3] Scientific citations are led by methodological papers describing techniques of protein and DNA extraction and isolation. Medicine's most cited articles are about epidemiology and various aspects of drug metabolism.

Books about Bahá'í history dominated the list of most cited books during 1978-83 (results not shown) and, to a lesser extent, during 1988-93 (table 4). Our study suggests that a new trend in Bahá'í studies may be now apparent. We found that articles about Bahá'í theology were prominent among the most cited short publications, including the two leading pieces by Momen and Cole, respectively (table 5). This development may help to fill a lacuna noted by scholars such as Udo Schaefer, "The theological doctrines...which are at the very core of a religion, have not been stressed as much in our research." In a sense, important research on the Bahá'í Faith has progressed partly from studying historical origins to exploring Bahá'í doctrines. Presumably the next stage will be how to apply these beliefs.

Endnotes

1. AHCI, covering 6100 journals, and SSCI, covering 4700 journals, are published annually by Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia; Religion Index covers 550 journals and is published annually by America Theological Library Association, Evanston. Index Islamicus is published annually by Mansell, London. In the period 1978-83, we were unable to get a copy of one article indexed in Index Islamicus: Maulana A.Q. Hashmi, "A planted ploy: al-Qur'an and the number 19 [Bahá'í numerology], " trans. M. Yusuf. Islamic Order 3.ii (1981): 46-49. [Return to text]

2. The impact of The Babi and Bahá'í Religions cannot be explained by its sales figures. Since its publication up to and including 1993, it had sold 2,451 copies; the least selling work compared to the GR's other highly cited books: 26,713 for Balyuzi's 'Abdu'l-Bahá; 26,448 for Taherzadeh's volume 1; 13,580 for Balyuzi's Bahá'u'lláh; 9,704 for Taherzadeh's volume 3; 3,758 for Momen's Some Contemporary Western Accounts. We are grateful to Erica Leith of George Ronald for this information. [Return to text]

3. The 10 most cited books, in descending order, are: Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Joyce's Ulysses, Northtrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Michel Foucalt's Order of Things, Derrida's Of Grammatology, Roland Barthes's S/Z, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, and Ernst Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. See E. Garfield, "A different sort of great books list: the 50 twentieth century world most cited in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, 1976-1983," Current Contents 16 (1987): 3-7. [Return to text]