Divinity Library Instructional Guide: Religious & Theological Abstracts
Introduction
Religious & Theological Abstracts provides objective summaries of articles appearing in scholarly journals in the fields of Religion and Theology. It currently abstracts more than 400 journals, with summaries produced by a team of scholars from around the world. Coverage includes journals relating to Christianity, Judaism, and other world religions. English language abstracts are provided for articles in French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Afrikaans, Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish.
Years of coverage: 1948 to the present.
R&TA is available online from campus workstations and by remote login. Access to R&TA is available from the Find Database page.
NB:The results of a search done in R&TA will rarely be identical to the results of the same search done in the ATLA Religion Database. Use both databases to get the best coverage.
Searching
The opening window offers five buttons: Search, New Search (clears previous search criteria), Help (explains Modifiers and Wild Card *), Home (lists subjects and periodicals indexed), and Tutorial (outlines effective search strategies).
Choose Search.
The search window has three columns: Modifiers, Fields, Criteria.
Modifiers are the Boolean operators used to connect search terms. To select a modifier, click on the arrow to the right of the box, and select from the drop down menu.
- The first modifier can be Not, or this space can be left blank The Not command ensures that a particular search term will not be present in results.
- The subsequent modifiers can be: And, Or, Near, And Not, or Or Not.
- The modifier Near means that the two search words should appear near each other.
- The operations specified by the modifiers are carried out in a particular sequence. The sequence is Near and then the other modifiers in the order in which you have selected them. For example, in this search:
records containingcatholic
Nearteaching
would first be found; from these, records that also containpoverty
would be selected; to all of these records would then be added any record that contains the wordpoor.
The better search would bepoverty
Orpoor
Andcatholic
Nearteaching.
- The operations specified by the modifiers are carried out in a particular sequence. The sequence is Near and then the other modifiers in the order in which you have selected them. For example, in this search:
- For more information on how to use Modifiers click on the Help button. For information on how to use Modifiers in different types of searches click on the Tutorial button.
Fields indicates the type of search. To select a field, click on the arrow to the right of the box, and select from the drop down menu. The options are:
- Full Text = Keyword Search. (This searches the text of the title, author, and body of an abstract.)
- Title - searches the title of the article. NB: As a rule, terms found in a title receive more in-depth discussion in the article.
- Author - searches the author or authors of the article. NB: An author's name may appear in different forms. To get the most reliable results, it is best to use the Browse button. (See below under List Search.)
- Year - searches the year in which the article was published.
- Biblical Citation - searches for biblical passages.
Criteria are your search terms.
- Only one word can be entered per Criteria box, however, you may enter an author's full name in the following format: Smith, David and Bible citations.
- Criteria are case-insensitive (i.e. capitalization doesn't matter).
- Author fields require a space at the end for exact matching. (E.g., entering
Hill
with no space after it will retrieve authors with the last names Hill, Hillsman, Hillerbrand, etc.) - Year fields require a 4 digit number. Dates before 1900 are not accepted.
- Bible citation fields require the criteria to be in a specific format, as follows:
Format: Example: book chapter: verse John 3:16 book chapter: verse range Genesis 1:5-14 book chapter Acts 3 book chapter range Revelation 1-3 book verse or verse range (for books of one chapter) 2John 3 or Jude 2-5
NB:
- The full name of the book or specific abbreviations (found in help file) may be used.
- Bible citation searches sometimes yield unexpectedly broad or inaccurate results. E.g., searching for Isaiah 31 brings up an article referencing Isaiah1:31 because it is cited as Isaiah 1,31..
- Not all Bible citations in the specified format for chapter ranges are accepted. E.g., entering
Isaiah 1-39
results in the messageInvalid scripture reference.
You may need to resort to entering individual chapters, linked with the Or modifier. - To enter a word in a criteria box, click on the box, then type the word.
- To search for multiple forms of a word, use the Wild Card (*). For example, a search for bapti* finds references to baptism, baptist, baptize, etc. Do not use the Wild Card in the first three character positions. It will take too long to perform the search.
- List Search allows you to select terms used in the database and is available for Author, Bible Citation and Journal Namesearches.
- Select Author in the Fields window. Click on the Browse button to the right of the Criteria box.. A List Search window will open with 3 alphabetical sequences. Locate the list of Authors. From the list, select the author's name you wish to search and click Submit at the bottom of the page. Then click Search.
- The List Search is especially useful for Author searches because the same author may be cited in more than one way, e.g. Childs, B. S.; Childs, Brevard; Childs Brevard S.; and apparently one time with a misspelling: Childs, Berevard S. To search for all articles written by Brevard Childs in the RT&A database you would need to enter each name in separate criteria boxes, with the fields boxes set to Author, and the modifiers set to Or.
- Select Bible Citation in the Fields window. Click on the Browse button. In the List Search window, under Bible Citations, click on the first letter of the desired Bible Book - e.g.
D
for Deuteronomy. Click on Submit at the bottom of the list. Then click Search. - A List Search can also be used to search for abstracts in a particular Journal. Select Journal Name in the Fields window. Click on Browse. In the List Search window, select the desired journal and click Submit at the bottom of the page. Then click Search.
Viewing the Results of a Search
When you have finished setting up the search, click on the Search button at the bottom of the Search window. A Search Results window will open with a list of matches.
- To view the full record for any of the matches, click on the Tag box to the left of the citation, then click on the Show Tagged button at the top of the screen.
- To view all of the matches, click on the Tag All button at the top of the screen, then click on the Show Tagged button.
When you click on the Show Tagged button a new window will open with the tagged abstracts. To move to another abstract use the arrow keys at the side of the window.
To begin another search, use the Back arrow on the browser to return to the Search window. Click on New Search.
Printing
- For each record that you want to print, click on the Tag box (lower right hand corner of each abstract).
- Click on Show Tagged button (to eliminate unwanted records).
- Click on Print to print the selection.
Downloading
- Insert your formatted diskette in the A: drive.
- From the browser window under the File menu select Save As.
- A message will appear saying, This web page may not save correctly. Do you want to save anyway? Click Yes.
- Select the A: drive. Rename the file if you wish. Save as a text (.txt) file.
