A Holistic Evaluation of Buddhism Literature: A Bibliometric Analysis of Global Publications Related to Buddhism Between 1975 and 2017

Abstract

Although Buddhism is the fourth largest religion of the world with almost 500 million followers, to the best of our knowledge, academic literature lacks a bibliometric study investigating Buddhism documents. We used four databases provided by Web of Science; Thomson Reuters to extract the academic documents related to Buddhism and included all items published between 1975 and 2017. We generated info-maps and info-graphics showing distribution of world countries’ publication productivity and connections in bibliometric networks. A total of 25,267 articles were included and the most common document types were original articles, reviews and meeting reports (76.11, 19,38 and 3.84, respectively). English and Korean were the major languages of Buddhism literature (48.12 and 44.95%). United States of America (USA) was leading country with 4572 articles (18.81%) followed by the United Kingdom, China, Canada and Japan (3.32, 2.58, 2.1 and 2.07%, respectively). The most productive countries were Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan (s = 19.34, 18.57, 16.42 and 15.45). We noted that six of ten most producing institutions in Buddhism literature were from the USA. No institutions from developing or least-developed countries were in the top-ten list. Researchers from the countries with large Buddhist population should be encouraged and supported to carry out more articles in Buddhist literature. © 2020, Library Philosophy and Practice. All Right Received