''Status quaestionis'', a

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

phrase translated roughly as "the state of investigation," is most commonly employed in

scholarly literature Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally publis ...

to refer in a summary way to the accumulated results, scholarly consensus, and areas remaining to be developed on any given topic. The phrase is often used by ancient historians, classicists, theologians, philosophers, biblical scholars, and scholars in related fields, such as (Christian)

church history Church history or ecclesiastical history as an academic discipline studies the history of Christianity and the way the Christian Church has developed since its inception. Henry Melvill Gwatkin defined church history as "the spiritual side of t ...

.Multiple instances of use could be cited, as can be confirmed by any search of

JSTOR JSTOR ( ; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary source ...

Google Books Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical charac ...

. The term began to be used regularly in Latin-language dissertations published by Germans during the late 19th century, and entered into regularly scholarly use after 1909, since year we find the first of 655 uses in JSTOR (as of July 2011).

Note

Latin words and phrases Academic terminology {{Latin-vocab-stub