Cybersecurity has become an essential tool for maintaining the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of data and information systems in all sectors in the digitally fast-moving major era. Cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities of the digital infrastructure rise with the increase in technological advances; thus, cyber security investigation is a top global priority. Research indicates that the domain has transitioned from only using technical models to multidisciplinary topics, such as artificial intelligence, sustainable development, behavioural sciences, and data ethics (Sulichet al., 2023; Zainalet al., 2025). Additionally, the rise of research on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence is the ultimate proof of their mutual dependence in the creation of advanced defence mechanisms and predictive systems (Albahri and Alamoodi 2023; Purnamaet al., 2024).

India with its digital economy, which is growing rapidly, and the implementation of the National Cyber Security Policy and Digital India, has been benefited from a remarkable increase in research related to cybersecurity. Present scientometric and bibliometric studies have shown that India is a major player in global cybersecurity scholarship through collaborations internationally and research done by AI-driven directions (Loanet al., 2022; Elangoet al., 2023). Nevertheless, current research has mostly concentrated on worldwide trends, applications to healthcare, or particular technological areas like IoT and machine learning (Jalaliet al., 2019; Ganji and Afshan 2025; Comanet al., 2025), whereas detailed country-specific mapping of Indias cognitive and collaborative structures is scarcely available.

The focal point of this study is to close the gap in the research by profiling the scholarly Indian cybersecurity landscape from 2016-2025 utilizing OpenAlex database supplied data. The research through R (Bibliometrix/Biblioshiny) and Microsoft Excel visualizes the trends in publications, major authors, sources for referenced works, essential institutional affiliations, and the most frequently used keywords. This paper through the assemblage of a cognitive map of the Indian research in cybersecurity, extends, in effect, a systematic survey of, among other aspects, the topics and sub-topics covered, the research developmental stages, and the academic linkages, thus presenting an empirically-grounded understanding of Indias dynamic stance in the global cybersecurity research ecosystem.

The extensive development of digital infrastructure and the increasing number of cyber-attacks have made cybersecurity research an essential area of concern for a global academic and policy. Many bibliometric and scientometric studies have examined its evolving patterns, collaboration networks, and thematic trends. To identify the emerging areas of cybersecurity and data protection, (Comanet al., 2025) performed a bibliometric and semantic analysis of publications from the Web of Science, which indicated numerous innovative-direction changes led by dynamic innovation. In the same way, (Abidin et al., 2025) performed a study on cybersecurity behaviour using Scopus data, thereby demonstrating steady growth of publications and that the United States, and China research has been the most influential, while advanced bibliometric tools such as VOSviewer and Publish or Perish were used for the analysis.

Being at the crossroad between technology and eco-friendliness, (Sulichet al., 2023) explored the interconnection between cybersecurity and sustainable development, and pointed out the urgency of establishing security frameworks that are in line with the global sustainability goals. Using Biblioshiny and VOSviewer, Ganji and Afshan (2025) carried out a detailed study on the IoT security, the authors uncover AI-driven and blockchain-enabled ethical innovations (Nobaneeet al., 2023). Pinpointed the primary contributors and the gaps for the cybercrime research area, whereas Albahri and Alamoodi (2023) predicted rapid changes in AI-powered cybersecurity research with deep learning, IoT, network defence as the major areas of application.

On a local scale, (Loanet al., 2022) documented a massive increase in publication and high level of international cooperation with India being one of the major contributors. (Jalaliet al., 2019) drew attention to the lack of healthcare cybersecurity research, whereas (Purnamaet al., 2024) illustrated how machine learning could revolutionize cyber defence. One can add that (Elangoet al., 2023) pinpointed India to be a major source with highly interactive co-authorship networks and a growing focus on AI and cloud computing. The overall narrative these documents provide is that the field of cybersecurity is evolving into an extensively interdisciplinary one in which the integration of AI, IoT, sustainability, and behavioural science is happening, and that it is heading towards the use of data-driven security paradigms that are morally aware.

The essential objective of this research is to understand the changing and diversified intellectual trends in cybersecurity research in India by conducting a detailed and scholarly output review. After thoroughly collecting the data from OpenAlex and performing the analysis with R (Bibliometrix/Biblioshiny) and MS Excel, the study is set to attain the following goals:

1. To examine the annual publication trend of cybersecurity research in India between 2016 and 2025,
2. To identify the most prolific authors contributing to cybersecurity research,
3. To analyze the top publication sources, including journals, books, and conference proceedings,
4. To explore institutional affiliations and to investigate the most frequently used keywords within cybersecurity discourse in India.

Current research utilizes an interpretive quantitative method to study the cognitive structure and the scholarly dynamics of Indian cybersecurity research literature. The OpenAlex database, which provides full and open metadata for global scientific output, was the source of the bibliographic data. The data extraction was done on 10 November 2025 with the search query “cybersecurity” in the title and abstract fields and has brought about 63,270 records worldwide. In order to establish a contextual focus, the first filters of the results were applied to the country (India, 3,443 records), year (2016-2025, 3,431 records), and language (English, 3,374 records) consecutively. The last dataset was saved locally in CSV format and was pre-processed in Microsoft Excel to standardize author names, keywords, affiliations, and source titles, as well as to remove incomplete or duplicate entries.

The sanitized data were subjected to analysis with R and RStudio through the Bibliometrix and Biblioshiny packages for revealing the intellectual contours of Indian cybersecurity research. The outputs were visualized and refined by Microsoft Excel for generating interpretive diagrams and tables that, when merged, exemplify India’s knowledge pathways and scholarly networks in cybersecurity from a cognitive cartographic perspective.

This study is based entirely on secondary bibliographic data obtained from the OpenAlex open-access database. No human participants, confidential information, or personally identifiable data were involved. Therefore, ethical approval was not required. All data used are publicly accessible, and due care was taken to ensure accuracy, transparency, and responsible research practices.

The research scene based on the OpenAlex dataset has pretty much been lively and changing rapidly in the area of India cybersecurity from 2016 to 2025. After country, language, and year filtering the data, there were found to be 3,374 Indian research contributions out of 63,270 publications on cybersecurity worldwide. A very strong indication of the output of research has been increasing at a very rapid speed over time is the annual growth rate of 58.57%. The predominance of journal articles (66.4%) indicates a strong commitment to peer-reviewed dissemination, whereas the considerable share of book chapters (24.8%) discloses India’s participation in the collaboration of edited works. The average citations per doc of 7.93 with the average document age of fewer than two years is a strong indication that the field is very active and quite recent and is attracting more and more scholarly circles (see Table 1).

The average authorship pattern of 3.58 authors per paper and 24.21% of international collaboration of India cybersecurity research are very clear indications that India cybersecurity research is a networked and interdisciplinary approach. Such a collaboration has the potential to deepen the scholarly engagement and expose Indian scholars to more global cybersecurity discourses. The continued increase of multi-authored papers is also a sign of the Indian scholars’ departure from the traditional method of individual authoring to a collective approach of knowledge production, which is a typical international research practice. In fact, the findings portray India cybersecurity scholarship as a lively, cooperative, and rapidly expanding one with a large capacity to influence the policy and generate new technology.

The trajectory of the publication of cybersecurity research in India over the period 2016-2025 reveals a phenomenal growth trend, which accelerates with time. The number of articles was barely 10 in 2016 and 9 in 2017, so the output of research was minimal during these years and only in 2018 did it start to grow steadily. The number of publications grew to 59 in 2019 and nearly doubled to 124 in 2020, thus marking the beginning of a regular upward trend. After the pandemic, there was a very sharp increase in the number of publications, which went from 245 in 2021 to 414 in 2022, and then there was a huge jump to 753 in 2023. The year 2024 was the most fruitful with a total of 1095 publications and the productivity not only mirrored internal institutional prioritization but also wider academic engagement with cybersecurity themes. The year 2025 is still trending with a slight decrease of 634 publications (year’s data is still ongoing), but the total direction of the growth curve is showing an average annual growth rate of 58.57% which is indicative of the country’s increasing attention to digital security, data protection, and technological sovereignty through scholarly research (see Figure 1).

Figure 1:
Year-wise growth of Cybersecurity publications in India (2016-2025).

An authorship examination reveals that Chinnaraji Annamalai with 39 publications is the one who mostly initiated cybersecurity research in India and as a result, is the dominant individual contributor. After him, Akashdeep Bhardwaj and Ishu Sharma with 24 and 19 articles, respectively, may be traced for their active and lengthy contributions. The number of papers of each of the four writers Brij B. Gupta, C. V. Suresh Babu, Keshav Kaushik, and Mohit Tiwari implicate a potentially strong collaborative engagement, thus, they are the group of a few scholars. Moreover, the authors Bhupinder Singh, Aadil Khan, and Atul Kumar are quite respective in the research field, each with more than 10 papers (see Table 2). The difference between the total and fractionalized counts discloses the collaborative nature of Indian cybersecurity research, which is a field where co-authorship is the main way to progress.

Analyzing the locations of the publications reveals that publications in book series and open-access platforms have been the prominent means of spreading cybersecurity research from India. The two book series “Advances in Computational Intelligence and Robotics” and “Advances in Information Security, Privacy, and Ethics” jointly account for nearly 18% of the total publications, thus indicating a strong inclination towards edited academic volumes. Besides that, open repositories like SSRN and ZENODO are also quite vibrant, thus suggesting a trend towards preprint and open-access dissemination. Besides that, journals such as IEEE Access and Scientific Reports are leading the way in presenting the growing participation of Indian researchers in international, peer-reviewed venues, which is an indication of both their recognition and academic diversification in the cybersecurity field (see Table 3).

Based on the institutional analysis, it is clear that SRM Institute of Science and Technology is at the forefront of Indian cybersecurity research with a total of 194 publications. Afterward, Chitkara University and Lovely Professional University can be seen in the position of third and second respectively with 171 and 151 research papers. Besides these, well-known private universities like Amity, Chandigarh, and VIT-AP also show a significant research output which indicates the rising contribution of non-government institutions to cybersecurity research. The specialized departments such as the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the School of Computer Science and Engineering are also very active academically and deeply engaged in the field (see Table 4). The predominance of multidisciplinary universities has, therefore, led to the conclusion that cybersecurity research in India is flourishing in technology-driven academic environments where there is an increasing institutional collaboration and knowledge exchange.

The top of the list are the keyword distributions with “Computer Science” and “Computer Security” being the two major themes that indicate a technological and security aspect of the research to cybersecurity in India. A vast number of “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning” indicates the ever-increasing use of intelligent systems and predictive models in cybersecurity solutions. The presence of terms like “Internet Privacy,” “World Wide Web,” and “The Internet” indicates a strong focus on privacy and data protection in the digital environment. Furthermore, the use of terms like “Business” and “Engineering” demonstrates the different facets of technology to which the cybersecurity has been linked, i.e., technological advancements and the organizational and infrastructural applications (see Table 5). Therefore, the keyword plan reflects the convergence of AI-driven, privacy-focused, and multidisciplinary research trends in Indias cybersecurity landscape.

The study shows a clear and rapid expansion of Indian cybersecurity research between 2016 and 2025, as reflected in the high annual growth rate and rising publication output. This upward trend aligns with earlier scientometric findings and corresponds with national initiatives such as Digital India, increased digital infrastructure, and growing policy focus on cyber defence. Keyword patterns-particularly the prominence of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and internet privacy-indicate a shift toward AI-driven cybersecurity themes, consistent with global research directions. The dominance of institutions like SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Chitkara University, and Lovely Professional University highlights the emergence of multidisciplinary hubs contributing significantly to this domain.

The reliance on book series, conference volumes, and open-access platforms suggests a preference for rapid knowledge dissemination and wider accessibility. Overall, the findings indicate that Indian cybersecurity research is becoming more interdisciplinary, collaborative, and internationally aligned, strengthening India’s position in the global cybersecurity knowledge ecosystem.

The scope of this study is restricted to the examination of cybersecurity research publications that are affiliated with India and indexed in the OpenAlex database from 2016 to 2025. The study is confined to English-language documents of research publications, e.g., journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers. Through the use of bibliometric tools like R (Bibliometrix/Biblioshiny) and Microsoft Excel, the research addresses various quantitative facets of the issue such as publication trends, authors with most publications, institution output, source impact, and keyword frequency. The study does not involve the qualitative content or full-text of the publications but mainly concentrates on the cognitive structure and collaboration patterns of the Indian cybersecurity research ecosystem. The defined scope acts to measure India’s contribution to the global cybersecurity scholarly and to provide a platform for the new research areas that can be instrumental in the coordination of research and policy.

The bibliometric study of cybersecurity research in India from 2016 to 2025 exhibits a fast-changing and collaborative academic ecosystem in India, which is in line with global technological changes. The country has shown its ability to grow in numbers as well as in quality of research with a 58.57% yearly rate of increase and a strong trend of papers with multiple authors. The leading use of terms like computer science, artificial intelligence, and internet privacy points to the trend of the integration of intelligent technologies for solving ethical and social issues in digital security. Besides that, the SRM Institute of Science and Technology and Chitkara University have been identified as the productive academic centres, while the country’s research visibility at the global level has been enhanced through the open-access mode of dissemination. This research confirms that India’s cybersecurity scholarship is moving towards a more AI-driven, interdisciplinary, and globally connected model, which indicates its increasing academic and strategic value in securing the digital future, apart from being a leading edge of basic research.

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