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In the last decade, cybercrime has risen considerably. One key factor is the proliferation of online cybercrime communities, where actors trade products and services, and also learn from each other. Accordingly, understanding the operation and behavior of these communities is of great interest, and they have been explored across multiple disciplines with different, often quite novel, approaches. This survey explores the challenges inherent to the field and the methodological approaches researchers used to understand this space. We note that, in many cases, cybercrime research is more of an art than a science. We highlight the good practices and propose a list of recommendations for future cybercrime community scholars, including taking steps to verify and validate results, establishing privacy and ethical research practices, and mitigating the challenge of ground truth data.
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Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Trends in Cybercrime Research: An Examination
Compared to other topics, cybercrime is a relatively new addition to the criminological literature. interest in the topic has grown over the past decade, with a handful of scholars leading efforts to generate empirical understanding about the topic. Common conclusions reached in these studies are that more research is needed, cybercrime is interdisciplinary in nature, and cybercrime should be addressed as an international problem. In this study, we examine a sample of 593 prior cybercrime scholarly articles to identify the types of research strategies used in them, the patterns guiding those strategies, whether the research is interdisciplinary, and the degree to which scholars engage in international cybercrime studies. Attention is also given to co-authorship as well as citation patterns. Implications for future research are provided.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1723635
- PAR ID:
- 10201947
- Editor(s):
- Jaishankar, K.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International journal of cyber criminology
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0974-2891
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 81-105
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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