A Scientometrics Analysis of Cybersecurity Using e-CSTI

The research area of cybersecurity covers a wide range of fields from networking, software, and hardware to cryptography, authentication, and cyberattack countermeasures. Meanwhile, few cybersecurity experts are familiar with all areas of cybersecurity research. So, an evidence-based analysis covering all fields is very important to understand research trends in cybersecurity without bias. Such a field of study is called scientometrics, and there are many studies of scientometrics in the area of cybersecurity. However, in the analysis of these existing studies, the overall structure of the cybersecurity research is not clarified, and it is difficult to grasp the overall picture of cybersecurity research. In this study, we focus on cybersecurity as a research area covered by scientometrics analysis and conduct a detailed analysis of research trends in cybersecurity using e-CSTI (evidence data platform constructed by Council for Science, Technology and Innovation), and Dimensions bibliographic data for the 10 years from 2010 to 2019. Especially, we identify four representative research clusters (cyberattack, cryptography, authentication, and blockchain) and 55 research sub-clusters in the area of cybersecurity. We analyze the research trends in each country and the trends of the research topics of interest at the cluster level. For example, our results show that there are differences in research topics of emphasis between the U.S. and China. e-CSTI assists policymakers and researchers in getting a comprehensive understanding of global research trends and topics of interest in cybersecurity research.