Four decades of security and privacy research: evolution of topics, impact, and the community

Abstract As digital technologies become increasingly embedded in societal infrastructure, IT security and privacy (S&P) have become critical for protecting sensitive information and preserving trust. These domains have evolved from foundational security measures to address complex challenges introduced by artificial intelligence, regulatory frameworks, and decentralized technologies. This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of the evolution of IT S&P research from 1980 to 2023, analyzing over 13k papers from the most relevant venues. Employing the frameworks of established theories from social sciences, i.e. Latour’s actor–network theory, and Bourdieu’s forms of capital, along with Leydesdorff’s key dimensions in scientometrics, we discuss the evolution of research topics and highlight research priorities in the past and today. We apply modern natural language processing techniques to build a taxonomy of research topics within the S&P community. Using this taxonomy, we analyze the community’s thematic development, tracing its growth from 5 topics in the 1980s to 100 distinct research topics, reflecting the field’s expanding scope and complexity. Analyzing 0.5M authors, we demonstrate strong collaboration networks in the IT S&P community. We also demonstrate that the proportion of female authors in this community has remained relatively constant over the decades, despite an increase in their research activity in recent years. Finally, we assess factors impacting paper citations, author networks, and the linguistic evolution of the community. This study enhances the understanding of the S&P research community, providing valuable insights into future directions. The data underlying this article, including the analysis code and data processing pipeline, are available in the repository at: https://pulse-of-cybersecurity.com/, which also provides an interactive webpage for exploring our results.