Mapping the Contemporary Terrorism Research Domain: Researchers, Publications, and Institutions Analysis

The ability to map the contemporary terrorism research domain involves mining, analyzing, charting, and visualizing a research area according to experts, institutions, topics, publications, and social networks. As the increasing flood of new, diverse, and disorganized digital terrorism studies continues, the application of domain visualization techniques are increasingly critical for understanding the growth of scientific research, tracking the dynamics of the field, discovering potential new areas of research, and creating a big picture of the field’s intellectual structure as well as challenges. In this paper, we present an overview of contemporary terrorism research by applying domain visualization techniques to the literature and author citation data from the years 1965 to 2003. The data were gathered from ten databases such as the ISI Web of Science then analyzed using an integrated knowledge mapping framework that includes selected techniques such as self-organizing map (SOM), content map analysis, and co-citation analysis. The analysis revealed (1) 42 key terrorism researchers and their institutional affiliations; (2) their influential publications; (3) a shift from focusing on terrorism as a low-intensity conflict to an emphasis on it as a strategic threat to world powers with increased focus on Osama Bin Laden; and (4) clusters of terrorism researchers who work in similar research areas as identified by co-citation and block-modeling maps.