The last two decades have seen an increased focus on reporting bias in large-N datasets. Research on coups d’etat has similarly increased given the availability of coup datasets. This essay argues that while the availability of such data has pushed scholarship forward, the data collection process behind these efforts remains plagued with limitations common to event datasets. Rather than building on what previous projects have accomplished, researchers have invariably developed “new” datasets that suffer from the same problems as earlier efforts. Specifically, we point to reliance on international news sources such as The New York Time and Keesing’s Record of World Events - without the adequate consultation of regional sources and expertise - as a source of concern. We explore this issue by assessing the coverage of coup events from three country cases from the post-colonial Middle East: Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Our findings show that while existing data on successful and failed coups are largely adequate, scholars interested in coup plots and rumors will require a wider breadth of source material to identify such cases.

中文翻译：

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政变研究中的来源和偏见：中东的教训

在过去的二十年里，人们越来越关注报告大数据集中的偏差。鉴于政变数据集的可用性，对政变的研究也同样有所增加。本文认为，虽然此类数据的可用性推动了学术研究的发展，但这些努力背后的数据收集过程仍然受到事件数据集常见的限制的困扰。研究人员总是开发出与早期项目存在相同问题的“新”数据集，而不是建立在以前项目已取得的成果的基础上。具体来说，我们指出，对国际新闻来源的依赖，如《纽约时报》和基辛的《世界事件记录》——没有充分咨询区域来源和专业知识——是令人担忧的一个问题。我们通过评估后殖民中东三个国家（叙利亚、约旦和沙特阿拉伯）对政变事件的报道来探讨这个问题。我们的研究结果表明，虽然关于成功和失败政变的现有数据基本上足够，但对政变阴谋和谣言感兴趣的学者将需要更广泛的来源材料来识别此类案例。