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Dissertation Information for Edna Ferguson Reid

NAME:
- Edna Ferguson Reid

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Library and Information Science

SCHOOL:
- University of Southern California (USA) (1983)

ADVISORS:
- None

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: An analysis of terrorism literature a bibliometric and content analysis study

Abstract: The decades of the 1970s and 1980s brought an increase in terrorism attacks. Because of this increase, political scientists, historians, psychologists, academicians, and other researchers have investigated several components of the terrorism phenomenon. These investigations have produced an accumulated body of literature on terrorism in the form of anthologies, articles, reports, hearings, and other documents.

In this study, the accumulated body of literature on terrorism was analyzed using several research methods which resulted in the confirmation of two hypotheses. The hypotheses are: (a) the study of terrorism has evolved into a scholarly field with its own core researchers and publications, and (b) the core terrorism publications contain concepts which are essential to understanding the terrorism phenomenon.

The literature of terrorism was analyzed systematically using the traditional research techniques of unstructured interviews and publication counts and the scientometric techniques of citation analysis, concept analysis, and clustering. The first three techniques quantitatively characterized the literature of terrorism and identified the most frequently cited terrorism-related studies, while the latter techniques (concept analysis and clustering) qualitatively identified core terrorism publications, researchers, and concepts, which confirmed the hypotheses. In addition, they characterized the communication and research patterns used by terrorism researchers.

The data which emerged from the study allow for the classification of the terrorism research group into Nicholas Mullins's four-stage model of group development. The terrorism research group is classified in the network stage with major obstacles in becoming a discipline (final stage of Mullins's model).

Solutions to some of the problems outlined in this study would assist terrorism researchers in providing policymakers with more systematic studies in the analysis of terrorism phenomena.

MPACT Scores for Edna Ferguson Reid

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-01-31 06:25:12

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