The consistently low credit-taking rates, 16 percent in 2016 (Global Terrorism Database), continue to challenge the understanding of terrorism as “propaganda of the deed” twenty years after researchers initially pointed out the conundrum. While providing an overview and evaluation of the limited existing literature on credit-taking, this paper draws attention to three core problems in the current literature on terrorist credit-taking, which may have led the low credit-taking rates to appear more puzzling than is due. First, the available explanations struggle to find corroboration when empirically tested and many also show theoretical shortcomings with strong unspoken assumptions and unclear predictions of credit-taking behavior. Second, data structure and data availability unnecessarily narrow our academic understanding of credit-taking. Finally, theories focused on group characteristics such as religious motivation or state sponsorship suffer from severe issues of sample bias due to unintended selection on the dependent variable. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research less prone to the problematic issues identified in the article. A re-orientation toward a less restrictive and more fine-grained understanding of credit-taking is advised.

中文翻译：

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恐怖主义信用获取的五十种阴影：对现有恐怖主义信用获取奖学金的回顾

在研究人员最初指出这一难题二十年后，2016 年（全球恐怖主义数据库）为 16% 的持续低信贷率继续挑战将恐怖主义视为“行为宣传”的理解。本文在对有限的现有信贷获取文献进行概述和评估的同时，提请注意当前关于恐怖主义信贷获取文献中的三个核心问题，这可能导致低信贷获取率比实际情况更令人费解。到期的。首先，现有的解释在经过实证检验时难以找到佐证，而且许多解释还显示出理论缺陷，即存在强烈的不言而喻的假设和对信贷行为的预测不明确。其次，数据结构和数据可用性不必要地缩小了我们对学分的学术理解。最后，由于对因变量的无意选择，专注于群体特征（如宗教动机或国家赞助）的理论存在严重的样本偏差问题。本文最后提出了对未来研究不太容易出现本文中确定的问题的建议。建议重新定位对信用获取的限制较少和更细粒度的理解。