International journal of information security: a bibliometric study, 2007–2023

This study employs various bibliometric analysis techniques to examine the intellectual structure of the International Journal of Information Security from 2007 to 2023. The aim is to identify the most cited journals, underlying research themes within the article corpus, and gradual changes in the research themes over time. “Lecture Notes on Computer Science” is the most referenced knowledge source. Underlying research themes were identified based on mapping the bibliographically coupled articles on to the knowledge areas from the Cyber Security Body of Knowledge using template analysis. Applied Cryptography is the most prominent knowledge area, followed by Privacy, and Network Security. Additionally, research on distributed systems security and Web & Mobile Security were emerging topics of interest. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons between open-access and regular articles suggested a few notable differences in author keywords but no differences in the number of citations received. Furthermore, regression analysis found a negative correlation between citation counts with the length of the article abstract and article title and a positive correlation with page count, being published in a special issue, and if at least the affiliation of one of the authors is different from others. Finally, prominent authors, articles, institutions, and countries published in this journal were also identified.