Application of Science‒Technology‒Society Studies in Information Security Research

The research question and problem statement I posed to answer simply has been: what kind of patterns and specific discourses can be identified around the keywords of “information  security” and “social construction” in information systems and its related reference fields such as social sciences, management studies, decision sciences extended to psychology. We may start summarizing the conclusions by stating that “information security” and “social construction” in the SCOPUS domain offers a wide range of literature in the social sciences and related subject areas; the initial search resulted in 406 article hits, whose basic bibliographic parameters with keywords and abstracts were downloaded. I categorized this sample according to the journals H-index, the Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) Q1‒Q4 ranking and the individual papers’ citations, into five—socalled structural—clusters. Three papers were identified as the highest referenced and most influential, and analysed separately. The other were clustered as follows: 30 papers were classified into CL1, a high impact cluster due to its high citation and H-index, 122 papers were grouped into CL2, a mature cluster, due to their publishing date and medium referencing, 71 papers fell into CL3, a high potential cluster, due to their high H-index and recent appearance and, finally 152 papers were clustered into CL4, the mainstream of the sample due to their medium impact and wide spread of publishing dates. These clusters were further analysed with basic text mining techniques: word counting, key word analysis, textual clusters and N-Gram analysis, and concordance analysis. I found that clusters are different as far as the academic discourse on information security evolves, and each contain unique added value to the social construction of information security amongst users, institutions, technology and public policy. Finally, conclusion and further research opportunities are presented.