Google’s Security Conference/Journal ranking 2017

As a follow up to the two previous posts on the topic, here is the version with the newly released 2017 metrics data. It provides a ranking of journals and conferences in different fields, and uses the h5 metric, “the number n of papers that were released in the last 5 years, and had at least n citations”. Google also now added a “Classic Papers” category for papers ( link)—but there was essentially nothing in that which I recognized.

Based on the h5 metric, the following ranking for security conferences and journals is generated here:

1. ACM Symposium on Computer and Communications Security (71)
2. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (68, +1 position)
3. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (67, -1 position)
4. USENIX Conference on Security (61)
5. Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) (56)
6. International Conference on Cryptology (CRYPTO) (53)
7. Annual International Conference on Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques (EUROCRYPT) (53)
8. ArXiv (see discussion)
9. Computers & Security (40,+4 positions)
10. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (38)
11. International Conference on The Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security (ASIACRYPT) (36)
12. International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (35, not in top 15 last year)
13. Theory of cryptography (34)
14. Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES) (33)
15. ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS) (31)

Some other honourable mentions where I published before, am involved, or consider submitting:

1. Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (INFOCOM) (80) 1. Computer Networks (54) 1. International Conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services (MOBISYS) (47) 1. Annual International Conference on Mobile computing and networking (Mobicom) (45) 1. International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) (32) 1. ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) (32, but only small security track) 1. Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) (29) 1. European Conference on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS) (28) 1. ACM conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY) (25) 1. International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS) (23) 1. Wireless Network Security (WISEC) (21) 1. Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID) (19) 1. IFIP TC 11 International Conference on ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection (IFIP Sec) (18) 1. IEEE High Assurance Systems Engineering Symposium, (HASE) (14) 1. Network and Systems Security (NSS) (13) 1. IEEE International Conferences on Internet of Things, and Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) (13) 1. Conference on Cryptology and Network Security (CANS) (13) 1. Conference on Formal Engineering Methods (ICFEM) (12) 1. Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm) (10)

There are some interesting observations I made from the ranking (updated from last iteration):

1. The h5 index of the top venues increased by about 5-9 points, with S&P returning to place 2. For CCS, this is definitely expected, as the number of submissions/accepted papers has increased significantly in the last 5 years. 1. Computer & Security joined the other two journals in the top ten list 1. Financial Cryptography and Data Security makes its first entry into top 15, probably due to Bitcoin/blockchain/smart contract related content and FinTec 1. ArXiv is in the list, but can hardly be counted as “peer reviewed”. 1. 5 of the top 14 venues (w/o Arxiv) have a strong crypto focus, further limiting the options for general security papers to be published at. 1. Google also publishes a h5-median score, which indicates the median citation count of the publications included in the h5 computation. This somewhat gives a nice indication on how many citations you could expect for your publications in the conference, after five years. For the top 10 venues, this is between 60 and 110, for top 10-20 between 40 and 65 1. Clearly, for h5 it helps to accept more papers (see ArXiv and Infocom rank). It would be great to award selectivity somehow, for example by dividing by number of accepted papers. Unfortunately, that information is not directly available (see here).

See also: aminer conference ranking, CORE2014 conference ranking