TopVenues: Open-Source System for Reproducible Cybersecurity Literature Reviews

Researchers have introduced TopVenues, an open-source system designed to address a fundamental challenge in cybersecurity literature reviews: establishing a reproducible and auditable denominator for the set of papers included in systematic reviews. The system addresses the problem that cybersecurity literature reviews currently reconstruct their paper pools from disparate sources—publisher portals, bibliographic indices, and scholarly APIs—whose coverage, formats, and query semantics change over time, making reproduction difficult.

TopVenues materializes corpus construction as a versioned research artifact by declaring venue and year scope, using DBLP Computer Science Bibliography as its metadata backbone, and enriching records with abstracts and BibTeX entries via open scholarly APIs and publisher-specific extractors. The resulting data is stored in a monotonic SQLite snapshot accessible through multiple interfaces: a command-line interface, a web interface, and export paths for review workflows. This design ensures that the corpus itself becomes executable, inspectable, and citable, linking corpus construction directly to auditable cybersecurity measurement.

The May 2026 snapshot of TopVenues contains 9,925 papers from 11 cybersecurity venues spanning 2017 to 2026, with comprehensive coverage: 99.86% abstract coverage and 99.99% BibTeX coverage. Keyword search across the full corpus completes in under 31 milliseconds, and a 250-test suite validates data-integrity invariants. Analysis using the fixed denominator reveals that 29.2% of papers from the four top-ranked security conferences published between 2024 and 2025 appear as arXiv preprints before final publication, with a median lag of five months. A prior-author-track-record filter for triaging preprints achieves a 16.5x precision gain at 90% recall when predicting which preprints will later appear in the same venue set.

The system was submitted to arXiv on 16 June 2026 by Ágney Lopes Roth Ferraz and the research team. By making corpus construction reproducible and providing standardized access to cybersecurity literature, TopVenues aims to improve the reliability and comparability of literature reviews in the security research community. The artifact is available through GitHub.