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The canon within the canon
Of the tens of thousands of verses in the standard works, a few hundred do most of the work from the pulpit. This study maps every scripture cited in General Conference, which verses are cited together, how central each is in each era, and how the weighting shifted toward the Book of Mormon after 1986 and again with the home-centred curriculum of 2019.
What stands out
- Moses 1:39 is the most-cited verse in the corpus. 340 talks cite it, first in 1938 by Stephen L. Richards; Joseph Smith—History 1:17, John 17:3, Matthew 11:28 follow.
- The Book of Mormon went from 17% of citations to 31%. That is the share in 1971–1985 against 1986–2000, after the 1986 emphasis on the book; it is 35% since 2011. The New Testament fell from 36% of citations in the 1970s to 29% in the 2020s.
- Half the top ten changed after 2019. John 3:16, Matthew 11:28, Mosiah 2:41, Mosiah 18:8, Joseph Smith—History 1:17 entered the top ten in 2019–2026; Mosiah 18:9, 2 Nephi 31:20, Helaman 5:12, Mosiah 5:2, Doctrine and Covenants 14:7 left it.
- Mosiah 2:41 is the fastest riser, Exodus 20:12 the steepest faller. Mosiah 2:41 went from 0.87% of talks in 1981–2010 to 3.8% since; Exodus 20:12 from 1.24% to 0.11%.
- Verses travel in company. The network's clusters are themes, not books: the Atonement cluster around Alma 7:11 and 2 Nephi 2, the Restoration cluster around Joseph Smith—History 1:17 and James 1:5, and the covenant cluster around Mosiah 18 and Doctrine and Covenants 20:77 each sit together whatever volume the verses come from.
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Model card
- Data
- 5,719 of 10,803 talks cite at least one scripture by chapter and verse: 61,164 citations of 11,312 distinct verses. Citations are the Church's own scripture links for 1971 onward, the citation index's marked citations for 1942–1970, and references written out in the text otherwise; the Journal of Discourses rarely cites by verse, so the network effectively begins in 1942.
- Nodes and links
- Nodes are the 320 verses cited by the most talks. Two verses are linked when one talk cites both; link weight is the number of such talks, and links are drawn from weight two. A reference to a range counts as its first verse.
- Centrality
- PageRank on the weighted network, overall and recomputed on each decade's co-citations over the same node set so the era slider reweights without relayout. Positions come from a force-directed (spring) layout of the overall network.
- Shares
- Book and volume shares are shares of citations in the decade. Rising and falling verses compare the share of talks citing a verse in 2011–2026 with 1981–2010 among the 150 most-cited verses.
- Known failure modes
- A talk that lists many verses in a single footnote links them all. The 1942–1970 source marks citations the transcriber recognised, which undercounts allusions. Verse ranges are collapsed to their first verse, so Alma 7:11 absorbs citations of Alma 7:11–13.
Methods and data for the corpus as a whole.