Data Sources: Media Coverage

There has been long-standing interest in the description and explanation of global terrorism trends in academics. Reviews of the transnational terrorism literature indicate that much of the evidence is based on open-source data sets that use media reports of terrorism. For example, in Schmid and Jongman's (1988) interviews of several leading terrorism scholars, 90 percent of those surveyed reported using data gathered from media and news services. Similarly, Silke's (2005) review of terrorism studies published between 1995 and 1999 in two leading terrorism journals, Terrorism and Political Violence and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, indicates that more than 80 percent of terrorism research is based [Page 93]on open-source media reports. Although data collected using media reports are less frequently relied upon in traditional international research ...