Global Terrorism Database 1.1, 1970-1997

The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is composed of terrorist events recorded for the entire world from 1970 through 1997. The data were originally collected by the Pinkerton Global Intelligence Service (PGIS). Throughout the data collection period PGIS employed a broad definition of terrorism: the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation. The data include "terrorist groups" identified as specific named groups as well as generic groupings like "rebels" or "student protesters." The researchers arranged with PGIS to move 58 boxes of original hard copies of the PGIS terrorism database to a secure location at the University of Maryland. A Web-based data entry system was developed to match the design of the generic incident card used by PGIS in their coding. In addition, automatic entry fields were created in the Web-based interface to be automatically applied under specific circumstances. Once data entry began, the researchers initiated the ongoing process of data verification. In order to develop the Global Terrorism Database 1.1 (GTD1.1), the research team supplemented the original PGIS data by incorporating incidents found in other data sources that were overlooked by PGIS. For several countries in the data, cases have been added, deleted, or corrected compared to the first release of the Global Terrorism Database (GTD1) [GLOBAL TERRORISM DATABASE, 1970-1997, (ICPSR 4586)] based on additional coding and investigation. Data in the GTD1.1 contain 61,637 events. Variables provide group name, type of terrorist incident, incident date, region, country, state in the United States, city, whether the incident was just outside of the city, the type of target, the identity and nationality of the target, type of weapons used, whether the incident was considered a success, and whether there was some damage. Further variables classify the total number killed and total number wounded. Further variables provide information about kidnappings and hostages, total number of days and hours held, and amount of ransom demanded and amount paid. Variables also record information about hijackings. Another variable also provides the number of incidents that the case represents.