Title of the dataset: Data underlying the publication: “A review of drought indices: predominance of drivers over impacts and the importance of local context” Creators: Sarra Kchouk. Water Resource Management Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands. Contact : sarra.kchouk@wur.nl. ORCID number : 0000-0002-4595-3476 Pieter R. van Oel. Water Resource Management Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands. Contact : pieter.vanoel@wur.nl. ORCID number : 0000-0001-7740-0537 Lieke A. Melsen. Hydrology and Quantitative Water Management Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands. Contact : lieke.melsen@wur.nl. ORCID number : 0000-0003-0062-1301 Description: This dataset has been used to determine the country of application of different drought related studies, focusing on both categories of drought indicators and drought impacts. Keywords: Drought ; Drought types ; Drought indices ; Drought impacts Related publication: Kchouk, S., Melsen, L. A., and Van Oel, P. R.: A review of drought indices: predominance of drivers over impacts and the importance of local context, Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, In press. Temporal coverage: From 1965 to March 2021 Files: * Queries: These are the queries that we used in the advanced search of Scopus to obtain our datasets composed of scientific publications mentioning a drought indicator or drought impacts. * script_text.R: This is the script we used for analysing our dataset. It aims to extract the name of the countries appearing in the title, abstract and author's keywords of the publications. How to execute this script is detailed step by step within the code. * script_dtb : It is a folder containing the files needed to execute the R text_script. They contain a list of the countries name, their synonyms, continents and regional divisions. * Scopus_dtb : It is a folder containing the input data we analysed with our script. These are publications retrieved from Scopus that we organized in the following folders: o WS: This is a folder containing the datasets of publications retrieved from scopus corresponding to water security related to droughts. The format is *.bib according to how the script runs. o FS: This is a folder containing the datasets of publications retrieved from scopus corresponding to food security related to droughts. There are three *.bib files in it : fs_2006 ; FS_2007_2016 ; fs_2017_2021 because the queries used on Scopus resulted in more than 4000 studies while Svopus only allows the download of the metadata of 2000 studies. We then divided the results in three parts by range of years. The tree files correspond respectively to the studies published before and until 2006 included, from 2007 until 2016 included and from 2017 to March 2021 included. o HD: This is a folder containing the datasets of publications retrieved from scopus corresponding to hydrological drought indicators. There are eight files corresponding to the eight most used drought indicators. o AD: This is a folder containing the datasets of publications retrieved from scopus corresponding to agricultural drought indicators. There are sixteen files corresponding to the sixteen agricultural drought indicators investigated. o MD: This is a folder containing the datasets of publications retrieved from scopus corresponding to meteorological drought indicators. There are ten files corresponding to the ten meteorological drought indicators investigated. Methods, materials and software: Adapted from (Kchouk et al., In press) We wanted to investigate the link between drought and 32 indicators linked to three main drought types (see file “Queries”): meteorological (9 indicators), soil moisture/agricultural (15) and hydrological (8). We then searched in the Scopus database for queries strictly including “drought” AND “[the indicator]” in the title, abstract and authors’ keywords of the studies. We repeated the queries for each indicator individually as we were interested in knowing country-based preferences. The sum of the individual indicators linked to drought queries returned 4137 articles for the “meteorological” drought type of indicators, 2799 articles linked to “agricultural” drought and 393 articles linked to “hydrological” drought. The title, authors, author’s keywords, year of publication, journal name and abstract were retrieved using the Bibliometrix package (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017) executed on R. In the title, keywords and abstract of each paper, names of countries were identified, corresponding to the area of application of the study. The same approach was followed for the drought impacts. We grouped drought impacts into two focus categories: food security and water security. The queries included “drought” AND selected “[drought impact]”. This resulted in 4764 articles linking drought to food security and 805 articles linking drought to water security. All articles were published between 1960 and March 2021 and the exact queries for both drought indices and impacts are included in the file “Queries”. Licence: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence Aria, M., and Cuccurullo, C.: bibliometrix: An R-tool for comprehensive science mapping analysis, Journal of informetrics, 11, 959-975, 2017. Kchouk, S., Melsen, L. A., and Van Oel, P. R.: A review of drought indices: predominance of drivers over impacts and the importance of local context, Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, In press