BestCommentaries.com Blog

Today I added a RSS feeds for 4 things:

• Recently published books - as the publication date passes, new books will show up
• Recently created libraries - when a user creates a new library on the site and then activates it
• Recently added book reviews - Right now this will include reviews from all users of the site, but I might change it to allow you to follow a specific user.
• Recently added books -this shows books that I'm adding to the site.

Last week, Kress approved the use of Dr. Jim Rosscup's Commentaries for Biblical Expositors, and this week we received permission to use the 10th edition of the late John Glynn's Commentary and Reference Survey. These two works are absolutely invaluable for biblical and theological studies. At the front of the book, Rosscup offers lists of his favorite works divided into three categories: Exegetical, Expositional, and Devotional. The remainder of the book is a thoroughly annotated bibliography of 100s of books.

Glynn doesn't offer much annotation, but his bibliography expands well beyond just biblical commentaries into backgrounds, special studies, and theological studies. He even covers websites and bible software. This book is a must have for starting out a bibliography and library.

I'm so glad to get to include their top choices in BestCommentaries.com because it means that the overall data just keeps getting better!

I just got word from Baker Publishing that I can use Longman and Carson's top rated commentaries in the site. This is huge news, since Carson and Longman's books (along with Glynn's) are the gold standard for commentary surveys. Thanks to Baker for being willing to extend permissions.

Longman's Old Testament Commentary Survey has a very similar style to BestCommentaries.com. Longman offers a short review and summary of each work as well as a 5-star rating. The combination of rating and review makes his work the most reader friendly of any of the commentary surveys.

Even though Carson's New Testament Commentary Survey is published as a pair to Longman's OT work, the two books are very different. Instead of individual reviews of each book as Longman does, Carson offers a running commentary of all the books together. He does not shy away from laying into works he doesn't think are good. This is probably one of the more entertaining bibliographies ever written.

Thanks again to Baker for letting me include their "Best of" lists.

As more people join the site, I'm attempting to build in some tools to surface reviews which are more helpful than others. Obviously the length of a review will be a factor in how much information it gives. But another major factor is how knowledgeable a person is on a given subject. If a person joins the site and only offers a single review of a commentary, but no other reviews, then it is difficult to know what he or she really knows about that commentary in comparison to others.

This is something that makes Amazon reviews less useful than they could be, because we can't quickly tell how much a person really knows about the commentaries in relation to one another.

So, I've added to the bottom of each review the total number of reviews the person has submitted as well as the total number for a given book of the Bible. Here's a sample for Gordon Wenham's commentary on Genesis.

You can clearly see that Denver Seminary has a ton of reviews as well as quite a few in this category, as does the previous reviewer, but John Piper's Desiring God has fewer reviews in this category. Of course, we know that a theologian of John Piper's stature has likely looked at more than 3 commentaries on Genesis, but we might not know that about another site reviewer. Hopefully, this will help students get a better idea of the value of each review.

Today, I contacted the OT and NT departments of Denver Seminary regarding the use of their awesome OT Commentary Survey (Drs. M. Daniel Carroll R., Hélène Dallaire, and Richard S. Hess) and NT Commentary Survey (William W. Klein, Craig L. Blomberg, and Susan M. Hecht). Dr. William Klein, Chair of the Biblical Studies department and Dr. Richard Hess, the Editor of the Denver Seminary Journal wrote to give their official approval.

This is a huge boon because their work is up-to-date, detailed, and thorough. The inclusion of their research and thoughts will be extremely helpful. Thanks guys!

Now that the site is getting more reviews in, I'm going to start working on a little bit more complex ranking algorithm. Here are some of the factors for calculating the review score:

1. Total number of reviews - a person who only submits a single review shouldn't have a much authority as a person who has reviewed dozens of commentaries.
2. Number of reviews in for a bible book - the more reviews a user does for a given book of the bible the more their reviews will count.
3. Number of "Helpful reviews" - Much like Amazon, the site will eventually have a "Did you find this review helpful?" link.
4. Account Age - over time, older accounts may gain more weight.
5. Internal modifier - for some reviewers, I may add a behind-the-scenes modifier that will give their reviews more or less weight . The reason for this is to be able to give more weight to credible academic sources that may not have many reviews.

Other factors that might adjust the score would be to take into account outliers in the data. For example, if a book has 5 great reviews and a single 1-star review, that single 1-star shouldn't tank it's score.