Crème de la Crème: Lessons from Papers in Security Publications

The number of citations attracted by publications is a key criteria for measuring their success. To avoid discriminating newer research, such a metric is usually measured in average yearly citations. Understanding and characterizing how citations behave have been prime research topics, yet investigations targeting the cybersecurity domain seem to be particularly scarce. In this perspective, the paper aims at filling this gap by analyzing average yearly citations for 6,693 papers published in top-tier conferences and journals in cybersecurity. Results indicate the existence of three clusters, i.e., general security conferences, general security journals, and cryptography-centered publications. The analysis also suggests that the amount of conference-to-conference citations stands out compared to journal-to-journal and conference-to-journal citations. Besides, papers published at top conferences attract more citations although a direct comparison against other venues is not straightforward. To better quantify the impact of works dealing with cybersecurity aspects, the paper introduces two new metrics, namely the number of main words in the title, and the combined number of unique main words in title, abstract and keywords. Collected results show that they can be associated with average yearly citations (together with the number of cited references). Finally, the paper draws some ideas to take advantage from such findings.