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An Annotated Bibliography for the Correlates of War Interstate Wars Database

We provide an annotated bibliography for the Correlates of War Interstate Wars dataset. The availability of such a bibliography should help scholars to address several obstacles to valid inference, including over-reliance on well-known or highly salient cases, concerns about whether proxy variables accurately capture the variable they are intended to measure, problems assessing the theoretical and empirical significance of outliers, and concerns about whether observed statistical relationships exist for the reason that theory leads us to expect. This document should also be helpful for scholars who are interested in coding new variables or in evaluating the appropriateness of existing variables for their research. The bibliography includes military and political/diplomatic sources and, where pertinent, highlights potential concerns with certain works. The introduction of statistical methods, a process that was driven most notably by the Correlates of War project, has contributed to significant progress in the study of violent political conflict. The creation of large datasets has permitted researchers to address questions that previously remained unasked and to have greater confidence in the general validity of results drawn from their empirical evidence. At the same time, however, existing datasets are obviously not a panacea. Any large dataset will inevitably contain errors, sapping confidence (especially among those who are unfamiliar with its contents) in the validity of results in studies that use it. Equally obviously, researchers will be unable to evaluate hypotheses for which valid measures of 1 We would like to thank Tanisha Fazal and Page Fortna for allowing us to make use of a list of sources generated in research for the War Initiation and Termination (WIT) data project, and Paul Diehl, Nils Petter Gleditsch, Glenn Palmer, and anonymous reviewers for providing useful advice and comments.