Information Security: A Scientometric Study of the Profile, Structure, and Dynamics of an Emerging Scholarly Specialty
Abstract
The central aim of the current research is to explore and describe the profile, dynamics, and structure of the information security specialty. This study's objectives are guided by four research questions: 1. What are the salient features of information security as a specialty? 2. How has the information security specialty emerged and evolved from the temporal perspective? 3. What scholarly domains contribute to information security in light of the sources used by researchers from the specialty? 4. What is the intellectual structure underlying the specialty of information security? Scientometrics techniques, including co-citation, co-word, and network analyses, constitute the research methodology for this dissertation. Bibliometric data, extracted from 58,908 Scopus document records for the period 1972-2014, were examined and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively to address the research questions of this study. Specifically, descriptive statistics were employed to establish the information security specialty's profile and changes over time. One hundred of the highest cited documents and most frequently occurring keywords were used as the basis for multivariate and network analyses to determine the information security specialty's intellectual structure. Amid its implications for high-level information security science managing, this study reduces the complexity of the specialty to controllable terms, supplies objective data for science policy making, identifies the most productive academic institutions, and demonstrates historical movements locally as well as internationally. At the lower level of information security research, it serves as an information retrieval tool to identify key authors, source titles, and documents and makes explicit the intellectual links between researchers, works, and research topics.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 01, 2014
- Accession Number
- AD1007419
Entities
People
- Nicholas V. Olijnyk
Organizations
- United States Military Academy