Poster: Future Work Statements at SOUPS

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 their results, and usable privacy and security (UPS) researchers commonly add future work statements (FWS) to their publications. We define FWS as a passage in a research article that suggests future work ideas that the research community could address. Considering these suggestions can help with developing research ideas that efficiently utilize prior research resources and produce results that tie into existing knowledge. However, our community lacks an in-depth understanding of FWS’ prevalence, quality, and impact on future research in the UPS field. Our work aims to address this gap by reviewing all 27 papers from the 2019 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) proceedings and analyzing their FWS. Additionally, we analyzed 978 publications that cite any paper from SOUPS 2019 proceedings to assess their FWS’ impact. We answer the following research questions:

RQ1: How do SOUPS research articles include future work statements?

RQ2: To what extent do researchers address future work statements from SOUPS research articles?

We find that most papers include FWS, which are often unspecific or ambiguous. 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 privacy and security community to improve the utility of FWS by making them more tangible and actionable, and avenues for future work.