How does one identify all the commentaries you own that contain commentary on the Gospel according to Matthew?
1. For years I used type:("Bible commentary", "Bible notes") AND subject:Matthew which comes up with about 74 volumes in my collection ... but I knew I was missing a number of resources that cover several books.
2. So I tried to expand the subject section to something like type:("Bible commentary", "Bible notes") AND subject:("Bible.N.T.Matthew--Commentaries", "Bible.N.T.Gospels--Commentaries", "Bible.N.T.--Commentaries", "Bible--Commentaries") which brings the count to 167 but it includes many false positives where my subject is further subdivided in the metadata.
3. I finally came to the conclusion that one cannot create a rule based solely on metadata that does something as "simple" as selecting all Matthew commentaries. So I limited a search to type:("Bible commentary","Bible Notes") and used the search argument {Milestone < ~ Matthew>} which results in 191 resources ... and thus far I have found neither omissions nor false positives.
Unfortunately, I find no easy way to Save to a Collection (which would not be dynamic unfortunately. Nor do I find an easy way to do a mass assignment of a tag to these resources.
Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that a comprehensive list of the relevant commentaries is probably worth the effort only for the primary Gospels of each lectionary year.
4. The problem is even more interesting when it comes to monographs with significant commentary on Matthew.. My current "best" solution is to search on (type:monograph AND (subject:Matthew OR title:Matthew)) ANDNOT publisher:"Text Creation Partnership" with a search for references < ~ Matthew> and sort the results by counts ... obviously not a great rule but a start...
