A Scientometric Review of Research Evolution in Digital Forensics

Abstract

In this paper, we reviewed the scientific literature of digital forensics between 1990 to 2019. The visualized charts of keyword cloud, surging keywords and co-citation networks were generated by CiteSpace V. Based on the analysis, it was found that: (1) the research contents of digital forensics are focused on eight aspects. They are basic theory and methods, physical equipment and forensic methods, image forgery identification, file recovery and data extraction, smart phones and social network forensics, case-based forensics and crime forensics, automatic identification technology and tools, cloud computing and cloud forensics. (2) The research evolutional paths were followed by storage media, image forensics technologies, data recovery technologies, encryption and decryption technologies, human and social characteristics. (3) The breakthrough of image forgery identification technology accelerated the development of digital forensics; smart phone and social network forensics and automated forensics technologies bring important paradigm shift; in the future, automatic forensics and cloud forensics will be hot research directions.