Motivation
When looking for related work for my PhD, Google Scholar is my go-to search engine. However, its results can be overwhelming. Citation counts alone are not always a reliable heuristic for paper quality. To narrow things down, one can use the source: operator in a query to filter by venue name. Ultimately that’s what I did. Over time, I had this saved search string that I would prefix every scholar search with. Now, I don’t know everyone’s workflow when it comes to literature review but I thought I could share this string with the community, or even better, provide a tool to build such a string according to your targeted cybersecurity conferences.
ScholarSec
ScholarSec is a small web app that does that. It builds targeted Google Scholar queries filtered by cybersecurity conference venues: you type your keywords, select the conferences you are interested in and it generates the corresponding Google Scholar query.
Keyword input box for building the search query.
Conferences are organized by tiers following the CORE 2026 ranking, so you can quickly select all venues at a given quality level (A*, A, B, C) or pick individual ones.
Conference selection by tiers (A*, A, B, C).
Individual conference selection.
Once the query is built, you can either launch the search directly or copy it to your clipboard. The conference data is maintained in a YAML file following the conventions of the sec-deadlines project.
Disclaimer: Google Scholar imposes a maximum length on source: filters, so most of the conference search string had to be abbreviated to fit within that constraint. While I manually verified that the number of papers retrieved for a given year through the filter made sense and was of the same order of magnitude as the proceedings, I didn’t automatically verify that the chosen source string was fully exhaustive.
Contributing
If you do find a mistake, a better source string or want to add a conference that you feel is suited, feel free to open a pull request on GitHub. Also, don’t hesitate to fork this project or adapt it to your domain. For any other question, don’t hesitate to reach out via X or Mastodon.
Banner image: Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel (1935), (Detail of) La Vision et l’Inspiration de Jeanne d’Arc. Musée des Beaux Arts d’Orléans.