This month in Special Topics, the focus is on terrorism. On the 10-year papers list, there are three prominent areas of research: psychological reactions to terrorism, specifically the 9/11 terror attacks; reports of the 2001 anthrax outbreak; and the more general psychological construct known as terror management. Other issues covered in the past decade include public health preparedness for bioterrorism, the potential for a smallpox bioterror incident, the concept of immune system recognition of foreign DNA as a cure for bioterrorism, laws with regard to antiterrorism, and the economic impact of prevention and post-intervention in terror attacks.

In the past two years, the focus remains largely on issues related to 9/11: post-terrorism post-traumatic stress disorder, resilience and emotions post-9/11, and surgical response to 9/11, to name a few. Other topics garnering attention in the past two years include studies of suicide bombers’ reasoning, the pathology and pathogenesis of the 2001 anthrax outbreak, and several studies looking at potential surveillance measures for bioterrorism. The papers are not limited to US-related terrorist attacks; two papers also look at terrorist attacks and patient care in Israel.

Methodology

To construct this database, papers were extracted based on title-supplied keywords for Terrorism. The keywords used were as follows: 

counterterror* 
OR 
antiterror* 
OR 
bioterror* 
OR 
terror* 
NOT 
night terror*

The baseline time span for this database is 1995-2005 (third bimonthly). The resulting database contained 1,826 (10 years) and  871 (2 years) papers; 3,172 authors; 54 countries; 673 journals; and 1,146 institutions.

Rankings

Once the database was in place, it was used to generate the lists of top 20 papers (two- and ten-year periods), authors, journals, institutions, and nations, covering a time span of 1995-2005 (third bimonthly period, a 10-year plus 6 month period).

The top 20 papers are ranked according to total cites. Rankings for author, journal, institution, and country are listed in three ways: according to total cites, total papers, and total cites/paper. The paper thresholds and corresponding percentages used to determine scientist, institution, country, and journal rankings according to total cites/paper, and total papers respectively are as follows:

Entity:	Scientists	Institutions	Countries	Journals
Thresholds:	5	7	3	10
Percentage:	1%	15%	50%	20%

Return to previous page