Pillars of Privacy: Identifying Core Theory in a Network Analysis of Privacy Literature

Privacy research is divided in distinct communities. It is rarely considered as a singular field, making it difficult to get an overview of the disciplinary identity of privacy. We use a bibliometric network analysis to investigate the privacy research field and identify its core theories in a quantitative (positivist) manner, followed by qualitative analysis. The network consists of 83,159 publications with 462,633 references between them, spread over 90 identifiable disciplines. Centrality measures provide the 112 most influential publications, among them 11 core theories that see widespread adoption in privacy research. A divide exists between the core theories, primarily focused on individual privacy, and the larger body of privacy research concerned with organisational and research contexts. We propose the Pillars of Privacy framework to bridge this gap, classifying the core theories on four levels of analysis along three pillars of privacy research: Privacy Concern, Privacy Calculus and Behavioural Outcomes.