Small vessel disease: a pipeline for segmentation…
A step-by-step guide published on DataShare
The University of Edinburgh's open-access repository, DataShare, hosts the most comprehensive corpus of public security and defence policy documents. Created by Professor Andrew Neal, a leading expert in international security, this dataset includes 607 documents from 119 countries, covering 1987 to 2024. It is accompanied by detailed metadata and Python code for replicating results, adhering to FAIR data principles and providing valuable resources for both statistical and qualitative research.
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‘The study of security discourses has been central to critical security studies since its inception 20 to 30 years ago’ says Professor Neal, highlighting the lack of prior large-scale, global, and historical analyses – a gap now addressed through computational text analysis.
The team systematically compiled these documents, manually searching for all 249 countries to overcome challenges in locating them. Governments publish security and defence documents in various formats and under different titles, and before this dataset there was no complete centralised repository. Converting the documents into machine-readable formats required text extraction tools, manual verification and editing, followed by Natural Language Processing (NLP) analysis to uncover patterns and trends.
This dataset opens the door to countless research questions, from threat evolution and regional security approaches to how states publicly communicate security concerns - influencing policy and international relations.
For example, a recent study examined climate in national security agendas, assessing how prominently it is prioritised. Findings indicate that while 84% of states mention climate change, it's generally a low priority. Most states dedicate less than 3% of their security documents to climate issues, with only five countries dedicating 10% or more.
‘My main interest has been tracking the explicit identification of threats in the documents and how these change over time and geopolitical space.” explains Professor Neal. “Other key areas of study include the relationship between national economic status and the threats identified by countries and non-militarized approaches to national security. Surprisingly, richer countries identify far more threats, even though life is certainly less secure in poorer countries” he adds.
Get in touch with Research Data Support for help and advice on DataShare.