toth_janos.pdf

In the literature of sociology of religion, there is a considerable scarcity of recent thematic meta-analyses. In this paper, we demonstrate the usefulness of such analyses to study thematic and spatial patterns of Christianity-focused results presented in high-impact journals. First, we created a new sampling and data cleaning protocol for collecting and selecting data from EBSCO and journal websites. Categorization was inductive and based on Grounded Theory. During the process, we identified eleven major themes in Christianity-focused research; each of these further divided into subtopics. Than all selected articles were further investigated in terms of first author affiliation, journal editor affiliation and journal publisher’s geographic location. Results shows that the analysis we have performed concerning 160 articles published in „A”-category international journals provided not only a structured overview of current themes in Christianity-focused research within the field, but also identified a major anglo-saxon research environment bias valid through both religion-specific and general studies.