User Resources

Navigating a database can be challenging, but our user guide is meant to give you the resources to make things easier and ensure you’re finding the information you need. Here you’ll find guides to each of our data sets, a glossary of terms, info on how to manipulate pivot tables or download data, and more.

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Glossary of Terms

When looking at U.S. arms sales or security assistance, it’s hard to avoid the government jargon. This glossary will help you decipher commonly used terms and acronyms to make understanding these programs easier. Here you’ll find quick overviews of common security aid or arms sales programs, explanation of acronyms, and definitions of commonly used phrases in security assistance and arms sales lingo.

Go to Glossary
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Database Guides

Need help navigating our databases? Check our Database Guides for quick instructions and tutorials.

Our data comes from publicly available government documents, ranging from Congressional budget justifications to government reports. Below you can find details of where SAM gets the information that makes up our database.

Dashboard Guide
Dashboards are like the summary page for our databases and offer a general overview of the categories, countries, or programs on our site. They display information like top recipients of certain types of aid, the number of recipients for a particular program, the number of programs for a particular country or region, and various charts and maps. This is a good way to get a basic first look at the data available. Data User Guide
Pivot Table User Guide
Pivot tables are the best way to access specific and granular data, and are great for finding more detailed qualitative information on that data. Depending on which category you’ve selected, you can display information by year, program, country, or region. The pivot tables also display a line chart at the tope of the page that corresponds to the selected parameters. Pivot Table User Guide
Downloads User Guide
There are two methods for downloading data from the Security Assistance Monitor Database. You can download full data sets or data according to the parameters you’ve set in the pivot tables. Downloads User Guide
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Data Sources

Our data comes from publicly available government documents, ranging from Congressional budget justifications to government reports. Below you can find details of where SAM gets the information that makes up our database.

View our Sources

Citing SAM

For help citing SAM, visit our PRESS GUIDE.

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