This article takes a look at the availability of data on terrorism and discusses the limitations that they impose of the theoretical development of terrorism research. The post-911 days have seen increased importance being placed on terrorism as a significant area of scholarly inquiry. The sheer volume of published literature has been nothing less than breathtaking. Yet, the level of publicly available data on terrorism has not kept pace with the scientific needs of testing hypotheses. After providing a brief survey of major strands of theories, this paper proposes a new look at the needs of collecting open source, publicly available data on terrorism.