COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE RESEARCH AND PUBLICATION PATTERNS IN BRITISH JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

Abstract

A comparison is made of the contents and contributors to the British Journal of Religious Education (UK) and Religious Education (North America). A content analysis of each journal was conducted for a 10-year period between 1992–2002. A total of 20 volumes were analyzed, with attention given to types of research published, composition of review boards, authors' gender, affiliation, religious identity, position, geographic location, and number of contributions. The question of what each journal can learn from the other is addressed, and implications for the field are drawn.

Notes

¹The authors thank conference participants at the Association of the Professors, Practitioners, and Researchers in Religious Education meeting in Denver, Colorado, November 2004, for helpful comments. This research was completed while the first author was on sabbatical at St. Michael's College.

Names of editors are identified on the inside front cover of Religious Education.

Dr. Henry Simmons and his graduate students at the Presbyterian School of Christian Education, Richmond, Virginia, did informal and in-class analysis of religious education publications but these are not available in a published format.

A further study might examine how much and what type of publishing authors throughout the field do, both in journals and in books and other forums, as well as the number of citations that each publication generates. This study would involve assessment of individual author's vitae, searches of relevant databases such as ERIC and ATLA, identification of significant publishers, and selection of individual authors to review. This article limited itself to two journals so the results are limited in scope, as most content analysis studies are.

This table is by primary author only. Results would be slightly different if all primary and collaborative authors were included. For instance, Garrett Evangelical Seminary would be listed because faculty members Margaret Ann Crain and Jack Seymour have co-published articles in RE. However, the incidence of collaboration is low in either journal (see Table 1). As well, some authors, graduate students in particular, changed institutional affiliation during this time, making any one method of reporting problematic.

Table 5, there were some authors whose gender was unknown. Consequently, these percentages do not total 100%.

Of note here is that the author Leslie Francis contributed eight quantitative articles to BJRE and four to RE.