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ETO's Research Almanac tracks global trends in research across critical technology domains, mapping growth trends and identifying leading companies, research institutions and companies. In prior posts, we used the Almanac to explore trends in AI safety research and AI research on the whole. Today, we'll take a high-level look at the latest subject added to the Research Almanac: cybersecurity.
Key findings
- Global cybersecurity research is growing steadily, with publications increasing nearly 60 percent from 2017 to 2022. That's impressive growth, though not on par with research in super-hot topics like AI.
- China, the United States, and India are producing far more cybersecurity research publications than other countries.
- In terms of raw output, Chinese universities publish the most. Other countries fare better after adjusting for paper quality (using citations as a proxy), but Chinese organizations still own the top of the table.
- By our metrics, the world's top producers of cybersecurity research include several universities you may not have heard of - from Saudi and Singaporean institutions, to a Chinese school with ties to government hacking groups, to a public university in Texas with an outsize presence in highly cited cyber research.
- Most of the highest-cited recent cybersecurity research papers are related to machine learning security and blockchain research.
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Overall trends
- According to the latest data from the Research Almanac, about 210,000 cybersecurity-related articles were published between 2017 and 2022. (This total, and the other Research Almanac-derived findings in this post, are based on cybersecurity-relevant articles with English titles or abstracts in our Merged Academic Corpus; they omit articles published solely in Chinese and non-public research. For further details and caveats, see the Almanac documentation.)
- Cyber research grew 57% overall between 2017 and 2022. That's solid growth, but the cybersecurity research field is both smaller and slower-growing than some other hot fields we've examined recently, such as AI.
Country trends
- 17% of the cybersecurity-related articles in the Research Almanac dataset had authors from American institutions. 20% had Chinese authors, and 15% had European authors. (Note that some articles lack information about author nationality, and articles published solely in Chinese are omitted, which could affect the numbers for Chinese authors.) The top three producers - China, the United States, and India - are far ahead of the next most prolific nations (led by the UK and Germany).
- Looking only at highly cited articles, America claims the top spot from China. 31% of top-cited cyber articles (defined as the 10% of articles in each publication year with the most citations) had American authors, compared to 25% with Chinese authors and 21% with European authors.
To view the next five leading countries in cyber research and see how global authorship has evolved over time across all countries, visit the "Countries" section in the Research Almanac.
Top organizations
- Eight of the top ten biggest producers of cyber research articles are Chinese research institutions, led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with 2,257 articles released between 2017 and 2022. (Again, we count only English-language articles - Chinese organizations' counts would likely be higher still if articles in Chinese were included.)
- When only highly cited articles are counted, institutions outside China claim a larger share of the leaderboard, though Chinese schools and research institutions still loom large. In fact, by the metric we're using here - number of recent publications in the top decile, by citation count, of all cybersecurity papers from the same period - the world leaders are the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Xidian University, a Chinese school that's little known in the West. CSET researchers have profiled Xidian's cyber program - and the school's apparent ties to Chinese hacking groups.
- Other prolific producers of cybersecurity research include lesser-known schools such as King Saud University, Nanyang Technological University, and the University of Texas at San Antonio.
We were a little surprised to see some notable U.S. cybersecurity research organizations missing from the Almanac's overall top-ten lists - think MIT, Carnegie Mellon, or major private-sector players like Google, for example. (Microsoft cracks the top ten for highly-cited paper output.) There could be a few different reasons for this. The Almanac's metrics focus mainly on publication count - the "missing" organizations might rank higher by other metrics, such as average citation count, count of extremely highly cited papers (say, top 1% instead of the Map's top-10% threshold), amount of research funding, or presence in important cybersecurity research clusters, to name just a few possibilities. It's also important to note that companies like Google and Microsoft may not publish much of their cyber research for security or competitive reasons - or they may publish in venues that aren't tracked in ETO's Merged Academic Corpus, like their own websites.
Bottom line: the Almanac's "top ten" selections are shaped by the particular metrics we've used. It's a good reminder to consider broad questions in emerging tech analysis (like "who's leading in cyber research?") from multiple angles whenever possible.
Hot topics
Some interesting trends pop out from the Almanac's top-cited articles list, which includes the ten highest-cited cybersecurity articles published between 2017 and 2022. Many of the top articles focus on cybersecurity topics in machine learning, including attacks on ML systems as well as techniques to improve the security and privacy of these systems, such as federated learning. Blockchain research, with its emphasis on cyber-related topics like cryptography and "security by design," claims other top spots.
To get a more comprehensive view of hot topics in cybersecurity research, we can turn to the Map of Science, ETO's tool for exploring global research in detail.
Read our companion post on the hottest topics in cybersecurity research, courtesy of ETO's Map of Science.
As always, we're glad to help - visit our support hub to contact us, book live support with an ETO staff member or access the latest documentation for our tools and data. 🤖
This work was supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation under Grant No. G-2023-22358.