Concordance (publishing)

Historically, concordances have been compiled only for works of special importance, such as the Vedas,[1] Bible, Qur'an or the works of Shakespeare, James Joyce or classical Latin and Greek authors,[2] because of the time, difficulty, and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-computer era.

A concordance is more than an index, with additional material such as commentary, definitions and topical cross-indexing which makes producing one a labor-intensive process even when assisted by computers.

In addition, mathematical techniques such as latent semantic indexing have been proposed as a means of automatically identifying linguistic information based on word context.

According to Cruden, it did not employ the verse numbers devised by Robert Stephens in 1545, but "the pretty large concordance" of Mr Cotton did.

After the death of Roland de Vaux in 1971, his successors repeatedly refused to even allow the publication of photographs to other scholars.