How the Future Works at SOUPS: Analyzing Future Work Statements and Their Impact on Usable Security and Privacy Research

TL;DR

This study analyzes the prevalence, quality, and impact of future work statements in usable security and privacy research, revealing they are common but often vague and underutilized, with limited influence on subsequent research.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth analysis of future work statements in SOUPS 2019 papers and their citations, highlighting their characteristics and impact on future research directions.

Findings

Most papers include future work statements.

Many statements are unspecific or ambiguous.

Limited explicit acknowledgment of future work statements in citing papers.

Abstract

Extending knowledge by identifying and investigating valuable research questions and problems is a core function of research. Research publications often suggest avenues for future work to extend and build upon their results. Considering these suggestions can contribute to developing research ideas that build upon previous work and produce results that tie into existing knowledge. Usable security and privacy researchers commonly add future work statements to their publications. However, our community lacks an in-depth understanding of their prevalence, quality, and impact on future research. Our work aims to address this gap in the research literature. We reviewed all 27 papers from the 2019 SOUPS proceedings and analyzed their future work statements. Additionally, we analyzed 978 publications that cite any paper from SOUPS 2019 proceedings to assess their future work statements' impact. We find that most papers from the SOUPS 2019 proceedings include future work statements. However, they are often unspecific or ambiguous, and not always easy to find. Therefore, the citing publications often matched the future work statements' content thematically, but rarely explicitly acknowledged them, indicating a limited impact. We conclude with recommendations for the usable security and privacy community to improve the utility of future work statements by making them more tangible and actionable, and avenues for future work.