Atla Religion Database is the main database for Religious, Theological, and Biblical Studies topics.
Atla indexes:
When selecting journal articles to use in your research, make sure you are selecting articles from scholarly/academic/peer-reviewed journals rather than popular magazines. Indicators of a scholarly article can include:
An example is this issue from The Journal of Religion. The publisher, University of Chicago Press, includes links for "About" and "Contributors" which gives information on their editorial process and submission guidelines. The first article in the issue, "The Case of Disappearing Discourse: Schleiemacher's Fourth Speech and the Field of Religious Studies," is 28 pages in length and includes 80 footnotes. The author, Andrew Dole, is a professor at Amherst College. All of these are good indicators that this would be an appropriate source to use if the content relates to your research topic.
The majority of the journal articles in Atla Religion Database are full-text, but you may need to use full-text options links to verify that ZSR has access to the book or article you have found. If you have problems accessing a book or article, please don't hesitate to contact the Reference Desk!
The same techniques that are used to locate books and films in the ZSR Library catalog will work to locate journal articles in the databases. While some databases have special features based upon the subject area they cover (Atla's scripture search or Historical Abstracts' historical period search), most databases have an advanced search page that allows searchers to use truncation (*), OR, AND, and other general search techniques.
While Atla Religion is the primary database for religious, theological, and biblical studies research, there are other databases that you will find helpful depending on your topic.