User:Vipul/Global Terrorism Database

The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is a database of incidents of terrorism from 1970 onward (as of June 2014, the list extended till 2012, but excluded the year 1993 due to data issues with that year). The database is maintained by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland in the United States. It is also the basis for other terrorism-related measures, such as the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) published by the Institute for Economics and Peace.

Data
The GTD describe itself as the "most comprehensive unclassified data base on terrorist events in the world" and includes over 113,000 terrorist attacks. The entire database (about 50 MB) is available for download via the website. The manner of encoding of the data is described in a codebook, also available as PDF download from the website.

History
In 2001, the University of Maryland obtained a large database of terrorist attacks from 1970 to 1997 collated by Pinkerton Global Intelligence Services (data from 1993 was missing because it got lost in an office move by Pinkerton, however, some summary data from 1993 is still available). With funding from the National Institute for Justice, the University of Maryland finished digitizing the data in December 2005. In April 2006, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), working with the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), received additional funding from the Human Factors Division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to extend the GTD beyond 1997. The data generated for 1997 to 2007 was then harmonized with the Pinkerton data from 1970 to 1997 to create a unified database of terrorist events from 1970 to 2007 (excluding 1993). New years were periodically added, and as of June 2014, the data goes up to 2012.

The GTD was formally introduced in a paper in Terrorism and Political Violence by Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan of START, published in 2007. An update on the GTD by LaFree was published by Perspectives on Terrorism in 2010. Another update was published in Evidence-based Counterterrorism Policy in 2012.

Use in other databases and indices
Data from the Global Terrorism Database is used to generate the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) published by the Institute for Economics and Peace.

Academic reception
A number of academic papers studying various aspects of terrorism, including trends in the amount and types of terrorism, draws on data from the GTD for its empirical analysis.

In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, author Steven Pinker used data from the Global Terrorism Database for his analysis of trends in terrorism, calling it "the major publicly available dataset on terrorist attacks."

Reception in news media and blogs
The Global Terrorism Database has been cited in The Guardian, Using a database of terrorism we look at how the frequency and type of attack has changedthe New York Times,   the Washington Post,  the Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Policy.