Skip to Main Content
Gateway Seminary logo

Library

Finding Journal Articles for Exegesis: Home

This guide explains how to find journal articles for exegesis. Consulting the instructions for finding books for exegesis will also be helpful.

Easy Steps to Finding Articles

The easiest way to find journal articles on a specific passage is to use the ATLA Religion "Scriptures" index.

  1. Go to library.gs.edu
  2. Click on "Journal Databases" to the right of "Reference Databases"
  3.  Click on "ATLA Religion Database"
  4. On the search page that appears for ATLA Religion, go up to the top left and click "Scriptures."
  5. This will bring up a list of the books of the Bible in canonical order.
  6. Find the book of the Bible that you are interested in and click 'Expand" to the right of the book name. Clicking the book name itself brings up all articles about that one Bible book.
  7. Click "Expand" next to the chapter you want to research. Clicking the chapter name itself brings up all the articles on that chapter of the Bible book.
  8. Click on the verse that you are interested in. You will get back a list of all the articles indexed for that verse or range of verses. This is what this looks like:

The ATLA Religion database contains Scripture references in a variety of ways. There are articles that have something like Acts 1-12 as the Scripture reference. The result is that some of the results you get in the search will not be very relevant to your verse(s) but most of the results wll be relevant.

Be aware that if you select a verse that the database has contained in a common group of verses, you will see articles on that entire group or on other verses in the group. For example, Luke 1:1-4 is the preface to Luke's Gospel. Much has been written on this preface. So if you look for articles on Luke 1:3, you are likely to get articles on Luke 1:1-4.

Important Tips for Evaluating Journal Articles for Exegesis

After you have performed a search, there are two important steps to take in order to get academically appropriate journal articles, which is the only type you want.

  • Peer-reviewed and scholarly: one or more persons qualified in the subject area have read the article before it was accepted by a journal for publication and judged it to be appropriate as an academic essay. Within Seek First, click on the filter on the left side of the page "Scholarly (peer-reviewed)." This will eliminate most devotional, sermonic, and other non-academic entries. Video
  • Recent (within the last 25 years): it is important to use articles that are recent, since ideas and approaches that were once popular are rejected by later scholars. You can sort articles by Date Newest and set the date range to the last 24 years or so.

More Articles in Old Testament and New Testament Abstrcts

The ATLA Religion database indexes numerous journals. However, Old Testament Abstracts and New Testament Abstracts index more journals and therefore will have more articles on various biblical texts. So if you want to see what else might be out there on your passage, here is one fairly straightforward way:

  1. Go to library.gs.edu
  2. In the tab for Seek First, which is selected by default, type the passage you want into the search box, e.g., "Romans 12:1" or "Luke 1:46-55" without the quotation marks.
  3. Click the search button, 
  4. When you get to the results page, you can use the results you see but you can also filter out anything that is not in Old or New Testament Abstracts.
  5. To omit the unneeded results, scroll down until you see "Content Providers" on the left side of the page.
  6. If you see Old and/or New Testament Abstracts, and it is what you want, click the box to the left of it.
  7. If you do not see the one you want, click "Show More" at the bottom of the list. Once you get the full list, click on "Names" at the top of the list to sort the content providers in alphabetical order. Now click the box for Old and/or New Testament Abstracts.




    Either way, go to the bottom of the list of content providers and click "Update." This will limit your results to articles indexed in Old and New Testament Abstracts. This will probably cut the size of your results dramatically.

Other Places to Look

We have some databases that include journals that are not indexed by ATLA or any other database you can access via Seek First. You may wish to look in these as well, but it is a bit harder.

  • Religious and Theological Abstracts: This index allows you to look at abstracts (summaries) of every article it indexes. That way, you could, for example, see that an article that seemed appropriate based upon the title is really not what you are looking for. Or, you will learn that a given article is exactly what you are looking for. This database is beneficial because it is often difficult to tell simply from an article's title and keywords what it is really about. Religious and Theological Abstracts does not provide full-text articles, as Seek First does, for example, but it does provide links to GS resources, which enable you to find full-text content if it is available.
  •  L'Année Philologique: A database on Greco-Roman antiquity (second millennium B.C. to 800 A.D.) covering a wide spectrum of subjects - language and literature, history, archaeology, philosophy, law, science and technology. It indexes books, articles in journals, conference papers and dissertations in English, French, Spanish, and German languages; 1,500 periodicals are covered. A brief abstract accompanies each article entry.
  •  ProQuest Religion Database: A database that currently indexes approximately 340 journals in religion. it does have some journals not covered by other databases we have as well as full-text of current issues not found in other databases.

To Be Really Thorough: Elenchus of Biblica

From 1920 up until 2014, the most thorough bibliography of academic publications on the Bible was Elenchus Bibliographicus Biblicus, later renamed to Elenchus of Biblica. Unlike other resources on this page, it is not an online database. It is available in print form in the Ontario campus library. This has many more entries than the the ATLA Religion database, Old Testament Abstracts or New Testament Abstracts. However, the three databases named above should be sufficient for a masters-level paper. Researching in Elenchus would be more appropriate for doctoral students who want to be sure that they have read "everything" on their subject.

Similar bibliographic indexing is available in the journal Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses which is available online (in the Peeters collection in the A-Z Journal & E-book List).