About RelBib

RelBib is a comprehensive online bibliography for the study of religion. It is available to interested users free of charge (Open Access), worldwide and without login.

RelBib is published by Tübingen University Library and its content is supervised by the Subject Information Service for Study of Religion (FID Religionswissenschaft). The bibliography represents a special view of the underlying data pool of IxTheo (Index Theologicus) focussing on the field of the study of religion. It has its own web presence with the RelBib portal. A team specially for RelBib guarantees that the requirements and specializations of the study of religion community are adequately represented despite the common data pool.

The cooperation with the Index theologicus, which is the older and more extensive database enables valuable synergies in maintaining the up-to-date discovery system VuFind. This open source software is managed for both systems at Tübingen University Library and is optimized according to the respective needs.
More synergy effects are being used when indexing articles in RelBib: For this purpose, (semi-)automatic cataloguing methods are applied, which are constantly refined in cooperation with IxTheo.
In addition to these technical uses of cooperating with IxTheo, RelBib can offer thematic content, articles which appear in journals, which are not explicitly counted among study of religion journals, being of a general nature or, are related to Christian theology.

Content

In RelBib you will find

  • Monographs (“books”)
  • Articles and reviews from more than 200 journals of the study of religion
  • Free electronic journals and digital content
  • Databases, weblogs etc. relevant to the study of religion

Thematically, the entire range of research literature on religion in – ideally – all languages is indexed in RelBib. Where possible, overlapping fields with other subjects are represented, too. Here you will find an overview of the content profile.

The RelBib team is constantly striving to include articles relevant to the study of religion which are published in journals from other subject areas. To this end, we intend to intensify cooperation with publishers or libraries.

Timeliness

New titles are added to RelBib systematically and on a daily basis. Around 200 journals relevant to the study of religion currently are indexed in RelBib at the article level. These are complemented by selected articles from numerous journals of related subjects such as theology, social, political, and cultural sciences.

Titles which have been added to the database recently are displayed in New Items. You can choose to view newly added titles of the last 7, 14, 30 or 60 days.