The scholarly encyclopedia, with content consisting of relatively brief articles on specific topics related to a given common theme, issue or area of study, is a particular type of academic resource that is simultaneously intuitively familiar to users who already have experience with general-purpose encyclopedias, and somewhat obscure because of poor coverage in scholarly article databases and subject bibliographies. Since a scholarly encyclopedia article is necessarily an introduction to a topic, its utility may be limited. However, it may very well be the case that a researcher or student is largely unfamiliar with a particular field, and a brief, general introduction is exactly what they are looking for.

Beyond the ever-growing body of academic literature on anime and manga, these two terms, as well as several related concepts, have in fact received a fair amount of coverage in scholarly encyclopedias. The details of such coverage are detailed on this page. Entries for each specific encyclopedia consist of basic bibliographic details for the volume or set, and a listing of the individual articles, along with their page numbers and authors' names.

Because of the limited coverage of resources of this type in the standard academic databases, at this point, the main source for this list is Google Books and Google Scholar coverage. For a project of this type, Google Books' access to tables of contents, and to short sections of actual full-text content within the books it covers is particularly valuable.

Coverage of anime, manga and related topics in English-language scholarly encyclopedias and other reference sources

(Last update: May 15, 2011)

1. Encyclopedia entries

Contemporary Youth Culture: An International Encyclopedia.
  (2005). Shirley Steinberg, Priya Parmar, & Birgit Richard (Editors). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.