Compare temporal coverage across conflict/campaign datasets — plot_temporal

Draws a line chart of the number of events per time period for any set of conflict_data() campaign or episode datasets, in the style of Guseinov, Ustyuzhanin, and Korotayev (2026), Figures 4-5. Comparing several datasets this way shows whether they track the same broad historical trends, and where one dataset picks up a surge or lull that the others miss.

Usage

plot_temporal_coverage(
  datasets,
  start_year,
  end_year,
  coding_system = c("cow", "gw"),
  period_length = 5,
  by_region = FALSE
)

Source

Guseinov, R., Ustyuzhanin, V., & Korotayev, A. (2026). Talking about the [same] revolution? A comparative analysis of main datasets of revolutionary events. Defence and Peace Economics, 1–31. doi:10.1080/10242694.2026.2704178

Arguments

datasets: Character vector of conflict_data() dataset keys to compare, e.g. c("navco1.3", "beissinger", "csra").
start_year, end_year: Integer. Year range to compare (applied to every dataset).
coding_system: "cow" or "gw".
period_length: Integer. Width in years of each time bin (default 5, matching the source article).
by_region: Logical. If TRUE, facet by World Bank region (one panel per region, as in Figure 4). If FALSE (default), a single global panel (as in Figure 5).

Value

A ggplot object. Requires the ggplot2 package.

References

Examples

if (requireNamespace("ggplot2", quietly = TRUE)) {
  plot_temporal_coverage(
    c("navco1.3", "navco2.1", "beissinger", "csra"),
    start_year = 1950, end_year = 2013
  )
}