Scientometric dimensions of cryptographic research

Abstract

Information security has been a crucial issue in modern information management; thus cryptographic techniques have become inevitable to safeguard the digital information assets as well as to defend the invasion of privacy in modern information society, and likely to have far reaching impact on national security policies. This paper demonstrates the intellectual development of cryptographic research based on quantifiable characteristics of scholarly publications over a decade of the present century (2001 to 2010). The study critically examines the publication growth, authorship pattern, collaboration trends, and predominant areas of research in cryptology. Rank list of prolific contributors, productive institutions, and predominant countries have been carried out using fractional counting method. Strenuous efforts have been made to perform the activity index (performance indicator) of JOC, to determine the degree of collaboration in quantitative terms, to ascertain the collaboration density, as well as to test the empirical validation of Lotka's law in this scientific specialty. Major findings reveal that performance of JOC in cryptographic research corresponds precisely to the growth of world's publication activity (activity index = 1.1) over a decade of time; single-authored papers count only 25 % and average authorship accounts for 2.4 per paper; an increasing trend of multi-authored publications and a significant degree of collaboration (DC = 0.74) implies that cryptographers prefer to work in highly collaborative manner; author productivity distribution data partially fits the Lotka's law, when the value of a (productivity parameter) approximated to 2.35 (instead of 2) and the number of articles does not exceed two. While large majority of collaborations constituted across the countries (56 %), then adequate amount of intercountry bilateral and multilateral collaboration signifies higher density or greater strength in the research network; most of the potential collaborators are emanated from 10 institutions of 5 different countries; however, cryptographic research is dominated by USA and Israel. More interestingly, vast majority among top-twenty ranked productive authors are & Jiban K.

Examination of China’s performance and thematic evolution in quantum cryptography research using quantitative and computational techniques

“…Compared with previous cryptology research in which data from only a single reputable Western journal were collected and analyzed [ 24 ], the current study widened the international coverage using a broader data pool that covers all major journals in the field. Data for the present study were collected from Elsevier’s Scopus , one of the two major sources that aggregates international research journal publication metadata.…”

“…Previous research performed by the present author identified a dramatic increase in information security research activity emanating from China [ 22 , 23 ]. Moreover, researchers using scientometrics have further narrowed the scope of analysis from the broader domain of information security to cryptology, which is an information security research specialty aimed at studying the making (cryptography) and breaking (cryptanalysis) of secure codes [ 24 ]. Moving to an even lower level of analysis, other researchers have applied scientometrics to the cryptology subspecialty, cryptography [ 25 ].…”

“…Moving to an even lower level of analysis, other researchers have applied scientometrics to the cryptology subspecialty, cryptography [ 25 ]. Prior research that has used scientometrics to study the general topic of cryptology [ 26 ] did not focus on China, and in another case [ 24 ] restricted the data collection to the Journal of Cryptology , a prominent journal in the field [ 27 ]. In another article, publication output was used to study the cryptographic research specialty [ 25 ].…”

Visualizing the knowledge outburst in global research on COVID-19

“…Applied areas of research are prone to collaborative efforts. Quite often, the scholars are being forced to collaborate due to interdisciplinary agenda of research that requires knowledge across many fields (Pal, 2015 ). However, the positive impact on the citation of multi-authored publications has been promoting the growth of collaborations.…”

Analyzing the contribution of material science in quantum cryptography: A scientometric study

“…Similarly, Coccia et al [34] conducted a scientometric analysis on publications and patents in quantum computing and quantum computers to identify the technological trajectories. Pal [35] analyzed an intellectual advancement and development in the field of cryptography through a quantitative study of literature published over the period 2001–2010. Gupta et al [6] presented an advancement in the domain of QC through qualitative and quantitative analysis of literature in the Scopus database (1992–2020).…”