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The notion that the terrorism subject‐area has failed to become a specialty because of too few researchers and trainees in the field arose first in 1983, and most recently in 1997 (by Reid), thus indicating an ongoing, unsolved obstacle in the developmental life of this sub‐field. This issue is discussed in the present study.
Authors of M.A. and Ph.D. theses were considered here as the future researchers in this field and as fulfilling the role of apprenticeship. The literature has pointed to this function as one of several conditions enabling a sub‐field to become a specialty, since it fulfills the function of self‐reproduction by providing a discipline with new and young researchers, new views and ideas and more accumulated and organized knowledge.
The abstract and bibliographical details of theses and dissertations were retrieved and analyzed from Dissertation Abstract International, which is a UMI database on OCLC's FirstSearch. This analysis of meta‐information should provide some indication of the status of the subject of terrorism today as a subfield and its chances of becoming an institutionalized specialty in the future.