Not all areas are equal: analysis of citations in information security research

Abstract

The understanding of the inner workings of a research community is essential to evaluate the impact of an author as well as to decide where and how to publish results. One of the key metrics is the number of citations that a publication receives. In parallel, information security is now a key and strategic area, partially fueled by the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the need of pursuing cybercriminals by using digital forensics techniques. Therefore, this paper analyzes several factors influencing the number of citations in the domain of information security, such as differences between journal and conference publications, or the impact of the number of pages and the length of the abstract. To obtain quantitative results, we investigated papers of six sub-disciplines, i.e., anonymity and privacy, cryptography, information hiding, IoT and Cyber-Physical System security, digital forensics and incident response, and network security. For each sub-domain, we used metadata of 5000 publications collected from IEEE-Xplore. Results indicate some clear behaviors, for instance, papers tend to receive more citations when their abstract is longer and the number of references positively influences the performance of the work.