Engineering Terrorismmindedness: A Scientometric Study of the 9/11-effect on STEM Research, 1989-2022

Abstract

We study terrorism’s shaping of STEM research through the development within engineering
research of a ‘terrorismmindedness’, i.e. terrorist threat domestication through integration in research practice. This is done by a distant reading of how research in the engineering sciences is increasingly addressing terrorism-related topics. By means of an in-depth bibliometric analysis of some 3.000 terrorism-related scientific articles published 1989–2022, we construct within the subject area ‘Engineering’ in Web of Science its research subfield ‘Terrorism Related Engineering Research’. The publications are analysed by bibliometric mapping, co-occurrence text measures and ‘algorithmic historiography’ using the HistCite tool. Papers cited together are mapped using VOSviewer to identify concepts and the results are clustered according to topicality, revealing the various terrorism-related research interests among engineering scientists.