Scope

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About the BAS • History of the BAS • Scope Notes • Fast-track Journal List • Subject Classification of the BAS • Organization of BAS Entries • Acknowledgments

Scope and Coverage of the Bibliography of Asian Studies

The current on-line cumulative version of the BAS includes more than 697,700 entries. They either were first published in the annual volumes of the Bibliography of Asian Studies (entries scanned from the 1971-1981 volumes, and electronically compiled entries from the 1983-1991 volumes), or have been added since the mid-1990s. While coverage for the entries dating from 1971-1982 was uneven, for the years 1983-1991, the BAS has sought to provide extensive coverage of Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and other Western-language monographs, journal articles and chapters of edited volumes that deal in one way or another with the countries and civilizations of East, Southeast and South Asia or with the overseas Asian communities in North America, Europe and elsewhere in the world (the regions encompassed by the membership of the Association for Asian Studies), and which are of durable scholarly interest.

The disciplinary scope of the BAS is in general intended to cover the humanities, the social sciences, and those natural sciences that have strong human components, such as medicine, public health, geology and the environment.

Earlier volumes usually contained some 15,000-16,000 entries per year, but the number increased to over 37,000 entries in 1991.

The coverage for monographs was based primarily on bibliographical records extracted from catalog cards printed by the Library of Congress, from its online catalogs, and from the OCLC and RLIN bibliographical databases. Since this information is now readily available to scholars, a decision was made in 1996 to exclude such monographs after the 1991 printed volume in order that the editors could devote more time to updating the BAS periodical entries.

Most scholarly journals that focus on Asia are examined and exhaustively indexed on an issue-by-issue basis. Asia-related articles appearing in a selected number of "non-area" periodicals such as Aussenpolitik (Hamburg), Daedalus (Boston, MA), Journal of Comparative Family Studies (Calgary, Alberta), Revue de l'histoire des religions (Paris) and World Development (Oxford, England) are also identified and indexed. Altogether, articles appearing in both "area" and "non-area" journals comprise more than fifty percent of the present BAS database.

In addition, a concerted effort has been made to analyze (i.e., index the separate chapters of) not only the edited volumes, published conference proceedings, and Festschriften that focus on Asia-related subjects but also a large number of such volumes that deal only in part with Asia. While each of the latter often contains only a few contributions on Asia, those articles are important on account of their authorship and/or subject coverage. Those entries often are unique to the BAS.

In addition, CONSALD, via Title VI grants to some South Asia National Resource Centers from the U.S. Department of Education, has provided funding for indexing over 10,000 South Asian records that were added to the first electronic version of the BAS.

The current cumulation also covers some one hundred major area periodicals such as Archipel (Paris), China Quarterly (Cambridge, England), Indian Anthropologist (Delhi), Journal of Asian Studies (Ann Arbor, MI) and Monumenta Nipponica (Tokyo) in as up-to-date a manner as possible. The full list of these so-called "fast-track" journals is available.

Needless to say, in the more than 30 years since 1971 there has been some inconsistency in what has been meant by "durable." In some years, for example, China Reconstructs and the Far Eastern Economic Review were indexed while in other years they were not. Juvenile literature (books intended for schoolchildren) were usually not included, but when covering topics in which there is little else published (such as re-told folk tales) they might have been.

The BAS Advisory Committee and its Editors are always open to suggestions for including newly published periodicals.