Data sources and method

How This Index Is Built

The index covers the Middle East Quarterly from Winter 1994 (Volume 1, Number 1) to Fall 2026 (Volume 33, Number 4): 132 issues and 2,082 entries (English, plus translations that the contents pages list). It lists metadata, a short summary and citations for each entry, and links to the full text on www.meforum.org, which remains the original.

Sources

1. Issue contents pages on www.meforum.org (primary record of what appeared in each issue). The MEQ issue archive links one page per issue, for example Winter 2003. Each page states the volume and number and lists entries with title, author and date. 131 pages read, Winter 1994 to Summer 2026, pulled 2026-10-04.
2. Article records from meforum.org: the Forum's local crawl of meforum.org article metadata (headline, authors, publication date, section, text), crawl of 2026-08-30; 1,545 records labeled Middle East Quarterly.
3. Article pages on www.meforum.org for contents-page entries outside that crawl (mostly 1994 to 2004): headline, authors, date and opening text read from each page's structured data, pulled 2026-10-04 (542 pages).

Full text is used only to write the short summaries. The site itself carries titles, names, dates, summaries and links.

How Entries Are Placed in Issues

1,318 entries are placed exactly as listed on an issue contents page. A contents page often lists the articles and one featured review; the remaining 764 entries (mostly book reviews) are placed by their meforum.org publication date and carry the label "Issue assigned from publication date".

The date rule: meforum.org dates issue content on the first day of January, March, June or September, for Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. The most common dates on entries that also appear on contents pages are 1 March (188 entries), 1 September (186 entries), 1 January (184 entries), 1 June (183 entries). Recent Winter issues are posted in late November or December and carry the next year's cover date, so dates from 15 November onward count toward the following Winter issue; other boundaries fall midway between issue dates. Volume = cover year minus 1993 (Volume 1 = 1994), which matches every contents page read (0 mismatches).

Check of the rule. For the 776 contents-page entries that also have a crawl record, the date rule gives the same issue in 771 cases (99.4 percent). The 5 exceptions are placed by their contents page:

• a-saudi-view-of-orientalism-incl-bernard-lewis: posted 2009-11-24, date rule gives Winter 2010, contents page lists it in Fall 2009.
• palestinians-reject-statehood: posted 2014-05-29, date rule gives Summer 2014, contents page lists it in Spring 2014.
• juan-cole-and-the-decline-of-middle-eastern-10024: posted 2005-12-01, date rule gives Winter 2006, contents page lists it in Winter 2005.
• book-review-sunaina-maira-boycott-the-academy-25741: posted 2018-12-01, date rule gives Winter 2019, contents page lists it in Winter 2018.
• review-iranian-women-and-gender-in-iran-iraq-war: posted 2021-09-01, date rule gives Fall 2021, contents page lists it in Winter 2025.

Issues placed entirely by publication date (no contents page read yet): Fall 2026.

Entry Types

Types come from the meforum.org section label (Book Reviews, Brief Reviews) and from title conventions (Dissident Watch, Correspondence, editor's notes). Everything else is listed as an article; interviews and symposia appear under that heading. Entries whose text is in another language (French, German, Italian, Arabic and others) are listed as translations; their summaries are in English.

Names: for articles, the authors shown are those listed on meforum.org. For book reviews, meforum.org sometimes lists the reviewed book's author in the author field, so a review shows "Reviewed by" only when the reviewer's name appears in the review's own credit line or on the issue contents page, and "Book by" only when the book's author is named in the review text. Both names are matched letter for letter against the source text. Citations for reviews name the reviewer only when it is known this way.

Summaries

Each summary of up to 30 words is drafted for this index by a language model (gpt-6-luna) from the opening of the entry's text (and, for reviews, its closing lines), then checked automatically: length, punctuation house style, and no run of 6 or more words copied from the source. 2,074 of 2,082 entries carry a summary. Summaries describe the piece; they are not author abstracts and do not state the Forum's views. Read the article on www.meforum.org before quoting it.

Citations

Each entry has a Cite panel with a Chicago note, a Chicago bibliography entry, BibTeX and RIS, generated from the metadata above: authors, title, journal, volume, number, season and year, and the meforum.org URL. meforum.org pages carry no page numbers, so citations give the URL instead. Every issue page also offers all of its citations as one RIS or BibTeX file.

License and Attribution

The Middle East Quarterly, its articles and its contents pages are published by the Middle East Forum; all rights reserved. This index is a finding aid: it links to each article and reproduces no article text. Summaries and citations on this site are Middle East Forum material.

Updates and Limits

• Rebuilt by hand when a new issue appears on www.meforum.org; last build 2026-10-06 15:49 UTC.
• Contents pages list what meforum.org lists today, which can differ from the printed issue (for example in the number of book reviews per issue).
• Titles are given as they appear on meforum.org, set in this site's house style: where a meforum.org title uses a long dash, this index shows a colon, comma or hyphen, and a trailing full stop is dropped. Citations use the same form; the linked page keeps the original.
• Publication dates are the dates shown on meforum.org, which for older issues are the issue dates rather than first-publication dates.