The Arab Social Sciences (ASS) Bibliographic Database
Brief presentation
The ASS database is a Group Library hosted on Zotero, which is, according to its words, “a free and open-source reference management software for managing bibliographic data and related research materials”. It aims at collecting and indexing social science works produced by Arab researchers in the twentieth century, in order to provide a historical, synthetic and workable account of social sciences in Arabic. Started in 2024 within an Egyptian background, this project is destined to be extended to the entire Arab world.
Current state (August 2026)
Apart from approximately 200 independent references, ASS currently comprises two main sets. The first is made up of nearly 5,820 bibliographical references (including roughly 700 translations of sociological works into Arabic). This generous contribution stems from a body of references manually collected, transliterated and indexed by Prof. Dr. Florian Zemmin (Freie Universität Berlin) and his team, as part of the Arabic Sociology project, funded in particular by the Arab German Young Academy. With Prof. Zemmin's agreement, I have incorporated this bibliographical dataset into ASS; all entries are tagged "Arabic_Sociology_Zemmin".
The second (1,050 references) corresponds to the academic works compiled in the Dalīl al-mushtaghilīn bi-l-ʿulūm al-ijtimāʿiyya bi-l-iqlīm al-miṣrī, al-Jumhūriyya al-ʿarabiyya al-muttaḥida (Directory of Social Scientists in the Egyptian Region, United Arab Republic), edited by Aziz Rashad at the American University in Cairo in 1961 (and held at its library). Each reference extracted from this directory has been tagged "Dalil_mushtaghilin".
For both sets, extraction of data, cleaning of references, correction of transliteration and Arabic, as well as formatting of the resulting spreadsheets into RIS files for Zotero, were carried out with the assistance of Claude, the artificial intelligence tool.
A dual referencing
The number of references included in ASS should be divided by two, since each reference appears twice — once in Arabic, once in transliteration. This dual referencing is justified by the dual nature of the Zotero tool itself. As a reference-management software, it needs to support searches for particular terms or tags — hence the use of Arabic, which avoids the errors and inconsistencies that arise between different transliteration systems (although IJMES remains the only style authorised in ASS). Zotero is also a citation tool, hence the use of the transliterated reference — the only form accepted in humanities and social science articles written in Western languages.
When manually added, the two are linked via Zotero's "Related" function (at the bottom of the entry); when added as part of a dataset, they share a reference number in the tag field. Example: RefID:160.11 corresponds to a work by Jirjis Rizq, Iḥṣāʾiyyū al-ʿIlāj al-Nafsī al-Madrasī (also entered under its Arabic title and tagged with the same identifier: احصائيو العلاج النفسى المدرسى).
Join ASS
Join the library and find here the instructions for members.
