Abstract

There
is little knowledge regarding the exchange of academic information on
religious contexts. The objective of this informational study was to
perform an overall analysis of all Buddhism-related communications
collected in the Web of Science (WoS) from 1993 to 2011. The studied
informational parameters include the growth in number of the scholarly
communications, as well as the language-, document-, subject category-,
source-, country-, and organization-wise distribution of the
communications. A total of 5407 scholarly communications in this field
of study were published in the selected time range. The most preferred
WoS subject category was Asian Studies with 1773 communications
(22.81%), followed by Religion with 1425 communications (18.33%) and
Philosophy with 680 communications (8.75%). The journal with the highest
mean number of citations is Numen: International Review for the History of Religions—with
2.09 citations in average per communication. The United States was the
top productive country with 2159 communications (50%), where Harvard
University topped the list of organization with 85 communications (12%).