Scientometric Analysis Maps Global Cybersecurity Research Trends from 2000 to 2024 - Bioengineer.org

The investigation, published in Discover Networks, traces the evolution of scholarly inquiry into digital security systems from 2000 to 2024. By systematically mining bibliographic records and applying scientometric laws, the study established that scholarly output experienced a sustained surge after 2009.

While publication counts climbed to their highest volume in 2023, citation accumulation achieved its maximum mark in 2021, when cybersecurity articles collectively accrued 24,456 citations across indexed journals.

Data extraction and methodology

To assemble an empirical corpus free from extraneous literature, the research team conducted a structured extraction from the Scopus database on August 6, 2024, utilizing the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses framework.

The authors developed a targeted search string incorporating primary keywords such as cybersecurity, cyber attacks, cyber risks, cyber threats, information technology security, malware, phishing, and ransomware. Because broad queries across titles, abstracts, and author keywords often introduce false positives, the query was deliberately restricted to article titles.

The screening protocol also excluded conference papers, book chapters, reviews, notes, editorials, and retracted items, while restricting results to final, English-language peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2000 and 2024. From an initial pool of 32,409 retrieved records, this rigorous filtration yielded a core dataset of 9,967 definitive journal articles.

Mathematical validation

The methodological framework coupled analytical software pipelines with empirical evaluations of three classical foundational theories in scientometrics: Bradford’s Law of Scattering, Lotka’s Law of Scientific Productivity, and Zipf’s Law of Keyword Occurrence. Data processing was conducted using RStudio’s Biblioshiny web interface alongside VOSviewer version 1.6.20 to visualize keyword co-occurrence patterns, institutional outputs, and transnational co-authorship networks.

Testing Bradford’s Law of Scattering assessed how cybersecurity literature distributes across 2,074 scientific publishing venues. Under theoretical conditions where journals are partitioned into three zones containing roughly equal numbers of articles in a 1 to n to n-squared ratio, a mean multiplier of 6.56 yielded an idealized distribution of 41 journals in the core nucleus, 269 journals in the intermediate zone, and 1,764 journals in the peripheral zone.

The observed empirical count comprised 41 journals in Zone 1 carrying 3,293 papers, 267 journals in Zone 2 carrying 3,385 papers, and 1,766 journals in Zone 3 carrying 3,289 papers. With a theoretical journal prediction of 2,074.34 compared against the observed 2,074 journals, the resulting percentage error was calculated at just 0.02 percent, confirming that Bradford’s formulation accurately models the concentration of cybersecurity articles in core periodicals.