In Taiwan, religious studies is as a rather young academic field, with the first academic research institute of religious studies established in 1988 at Fu Jen Catholic University.This institute was developed into the Department of Religious Studies thereafter. Eighteen years later, in 2016, Taiwanese scholar of religion Yen-zen Tsai makes the following observation about the status of religious studies in Taiwan:

... regardless of whether for its individual branches or as in integrated academic field, the intellectual performance of religious studies in Taiwan is still at a level of low-productivity and mediocre-quality. Looking for it reason, it is mainly because most scholars are satisfied with what they already know, remains within their interests all along, without any breakthrough in either vision, topic and methodology. Year after year they are only recycling and duplicating within their own “expertise” (Tsai, 2016: 8).Translation from traditional Chinese by the author.

In this paper, we would like to investigate the development of religious studies as an academic field in Taiwan, as a partial response to Tsai’s comments, and to find out if religion scholars in Taiwan have become more productive, and if their “vision, topic and methodology” of research has become more diversified, by using bibliometric analysis of articles published in several religious studies journals in Taiwan over the years 2000–2024.

Since the 1970s, bibliometric study of academic articles has been used in natural sciences in order to examine the trend, characteristics, intra- and interdisciplinary relations of a certain field of research, or a community of researchers, with substantial results (Small, 1973).When quantitative methods are applied specifically to the analysis of scientific research outputs, they are often referred to as scientometrics. Methodologically, however, scientometrics uses bibliometric techniques (De Bellis, 2009, p. xi). Among the most commonly used bibliometric methods is citation analysis, which can be subdivided into bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis. These methods can help researchers to describe and even visualize the academic “map” or “intellectual structure” of the studied field (White / Griffith, 1981; Small / Griffith, 1974; Griffith et al., 1974).

Since our study will not only look into the characteristics of the field of religious studies itself, but also its interactions with other disciplines, we use both bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis. While bibliographic coupling is more suitable for grouping together articles of similar topics, which can reflect the characteristics of the field’s subject and content of research, co-citation analysis tells more about the commonality among the cited materials, such as methodologies (De Bellis, 2009: 157), which helps to understand the interactions between religious studies and other disciplines. Our study differs from most citation analysis in that we include cited references which are not journal articles, such as monographs, collected essays, newspaper articles, etc., as they can also provide valuable data for the analysis of research topics, methodologies, and interdisciplinary interactions. On the one hand, different from natural sciences and engineering articles which mainly cite journal articles, humanities articles cite more monographs. On the other hand, we are concerned if the horizon of religious studies extends beyond its own expertise or even academic boundaries towards the larger society.

Rather than analyzing which articles have been cited, we use author citation and co-citation data, as well as the groupings according to authors’ field of expertise, region and historical period, to increase the depth of analysis, and to understand the exchange in religious studies across different disciplines, regions and periods of time. The use of author instead of article as the unit of citation analysis was first proposed by White & Griffith (1981), who suggest that a cited author represents not a person per se, but an entire body of work (œuvre). Since the same idea of a humanities scholar may be found in different works, one can cite the same idea of an author by citing different works. Therefore, we use cited author as the unit of analysis. Moreover, since our study concern also authors whose fields of expertise are outside of religious studies, we first find out the most cited authors in religious journal articles, and only identify co-cited author pairs after that.

As for investigations of the research fronts in religious studies, besides the study of Heidi Campbell (2012) on the published articles in digital religious studies,Campbell’s study does not employ bibliometric methods, but rather relies on content analysis. Wesley Wildman (2021) recently begins to analyze “academic study of religion” using bibliometric methods. Using the information concerning the authors, institutions, subfields, and citation indexes, Wildman tries to locate the main scholars, research organizations, co-authoring groups, and topics in the areas which he called “scientific study of religion,” or SSR. However, Wildman does not use bibliographic coupling and citation analysis, two common methods in bibliometrics; instead, he uses citation indexes (h-5 indexes) for religion journals to measure the influence of SSR in the field of the study of religion.

Although there have been various bibliometrics studies of the field of religious studies in recent years (Şenel / Demir, 2018; Carey et al., 2023; Peng / Chen, 2024), these studies mostly analyze only received citations instead of cited references, as they focus more on studying the influence of papers within the field, rather than how the field is influenced by other academic disciplines. Our study, which analyzes cited documents and authors, is complementary to intra-field citation studies such as Wildman’s, and our findings can be compared with and placed in dialogue with their results. We agree with Wildman that for humanities and its scholars, both journal articles and books should be included in the analysis, which is also lacking from most bibliometric analyses of religious journals.

We collect information on referenced works in all the articles published by the three major journals of religious studies in Taiwan, from different sources, including XML-tagged article files and citation databases. Information about the authors of cited works is collected through different channels, including the Virtual International Authority File (viaf.org). In addition to reporting our initial findings about the history and trends of religious studies in Taiwan by bibliometric analysis of the field’s major academic journals, we also discuss the data collection process, methods of analysis, tools development, and database design used in the study.