Homeland security literature in relation to terrorism publications: The source and the response

Summary The literature on Terrorism and National Security (NS), and Homeland Security (HS) presents two sides of a coin: one side demonstrates the problematic nature of terrorism and asks for solutions; the other side tries to find a response and solutions to the problem. It was expected that the NS literature would emanate from the same source material as the HS publications. Analysis of the literature of terrorism, homeland security, and national security on Science Citation Index (SCI) has shown that the material on terrorism and NS stems from the same scientific sources; that is, the Social Sciences. In contrast, the HS scientific literature originates in the exact sciences, engineering, and life and environmental sources. The three kinds of literature have grown remarkably in recent years; however, cross-section search strategy between terrorism and HS studies yields small retrieval sets. This means that few articles both present the problem and propose possible solutions. Currently, HS is on one side of the scholarly arena, and NS and terrorism literature on the other side; they advance mostly in lines parallel to each other, but as the researcher moves from observing the core scientific literature toward the more general material, this state of affairs changes. Another analysis of a multimedia database, WorldCatalog (which indexes mostly books, but also videos and computer materials, both scientific and popular) demonstrates a different trend; the same publications deal with both terrorism and HS counter-terrorism, and suggested solutions.