Mahmood Shah’s scientific contributions

Implementing machine learning is imperative for enhancing advanced cybersecurity practices globally. The current cybersecurity landscape needs further investigation into the potential impasse. This scientometric study aims to comprehensively analyse the study patterns and key contributions at the nexus of cybersecurity and machine learning. The analysis examines publication trends, citation analysis, and intensive research networks to discover key authors, significant organisations, major countries, and emerging research areas. The search was conducted on the Scopus database, and 3712 final documents were selected after a thorough screening from January 2016 to January 2025. The VOSviewer tool was used to map citation networks and visualise co-authorship networks, enabling the discovery of research patterns, top contributors, and hot topics in the domain. The findings uncovered the substantial growth in publications bridging cybersecurity with machine learning and deep learning, involving 2865 authors across 160 institutions and 114 countries. Saudi Arabia emerged as a top contributing nation with flaunting high productivity. IEEE and Sensors are the key publication sources instrumental in producing interdisciplinary research. Iqbal H. Sarker and N. Moustafa are notable authors, with 17 and 16 publications each. This study emphasises the significance of global partnerships and multidisciplinary research in enhancing cybersecurity posture and identifying key research areas for future studies. This study further highlights its importance by guiding policymakers and practitioners to develop advanced machine learning-based cybersecurity strategies.

Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL), subsets of artificial intelligence (AI), are the core technologies that lead significant transformation and innovation in various industries by integrating AI-driven solutions. Understanding ML and DL is essential to logically analyse the applicability of ML and DL and identify their effectiveness in different areas like healthcare, finance, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation. ML consists of supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised, and reinforcement learning techniques. On the other hand, DL, a subfield of ML, comprising neural networks (NNs), can deal with complicated datasets in health, autonomous systems, and finance industries. This study presents a holistic view of ML and DL technologies, analysing algorithms and their application’s capacity to address real-world problems. The study investigates the real-world application areas in which ML and DL techniques are implemented. Moreover, the study highlights the latest trends and possible future avenues for research and development (R&D), which consist of developing hybrid models, generative AI, and incorporating ML and DL with the latest technologies. The study aims to provide a comprehensive view on ML and DL technologies, which can serve as a reference guide for researchers, industry professionals, practitioners, and policy makers.