Online Terrorism Studies: Analysis of the Literature

• Published in: Studies in conflict and terrorism 2022-09, Vol.ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print), p.1-24
• Main Authors: Unlu, Ali, Yilmaz, Kamil
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1057-610X; 1521-0731
• DOI: 10.1080/1057610X.2022.2122108

This study examined the literature on online terrorism studies between 2001 and 2022 and compared themes across journal segments and funded research. The results showed that there is a relationship between funding and the number of publications in recent years. While themes in the core terrorism journals more likely to follow the traditional terrorism studies, funded research (e.g. Computer Science Journals) focus more on social media, far-right groups and hate speech utilizing new research tools such as machine learning and text mining techniques. These new tools enable researchers to study different dimensions of the phenomenon, but these works are not published in terrorism journals. The results also point to a gap between core terrorism journals and Computer Science journals, which heralds at least two potential developments in the future: i) emergence of specialized journals focusing on terrorism and concepts like social media, populism, hate speech, text mining, machine learning and so on; and ii) more collaborative outputs between terrorism researchers and computer scientists.