A short life of the author
Edward F. Mickolus is an American political scientist, former CIA analyst, and one of the foremost compilers of data on international terrorism. He created the ITERATE (International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events) database in the 1970s, which became one of the foundational quantitative datasets for the academic study of transnational terrorism.
Mickolus has authored or co-authored numerous encyclopedic reference works, including Transnational Terrorism: A Chronology of Events (1980), The Terrorist List (2009), and the multi-volume Terrorism chronology series. His work provides year-by-year, incident-by-incident documentation of terrorist events worldwide.
Collecting Mickolus
Mickolus’s reference works are collected by libraries, intelligence professionals, and scholars of terrorism studies and international security. The multi-volume chronologies are substantial reference works, and the ITERATE dataset has been cited in hundreds of academic publications.
Mickolus’s quantitative approach to terrorism studies helped establish the field as an empirical discipline grounded in systematic data collection rather than impressionistic analysis.