# A Comprehensive Review and Assessment of Cybersecurity Vulnerability Detection Methodologies
## 2 Research Methodology  
The methodology adopted followed a systematic literature review (SLR), proposed by authors in [12], to derive conclusions and reflections about the above research questions. This academic approach helped us gather, examine, sort, and study the pertinent papers within the topic frame. The recommended guidelines of this method consist of three main stages:  
* Planning the review, which focuses first on the identification of the need for a review, their proposal, and the development of their protocol;
* Conducting the review involves identifying the research using predefined keywords and search strings, selecting the studies based on inclusion and exclusion criteria, performing a study quality assessment using predefined criteria and checklists, extracting data, and monitoring progress before summarizing findings and providing data synthesis;
* Reporting recommendations and disseminating evidence through a descriptive analysis of findings and insights.  
Consulting several reputable academic libraries helped us to gather pertinent articles related to our subject and respond to the research questions. These libraries are as follows:  
1. ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) digital library;
2. JSTOR;
3. IEEE Xplore digital library;
4. MDPI;
5. ScienceDirect;
6. Scopus;
7. Springer;
8. Web of Science.  
The current study aims to collect pertinent papers published from 2016 to 2024. To this end, many specific keywords are used in the research methodology during this period, such as: \"CPE and CVE\", \"vulnerability detection\", \"vulnerability assessment\", \"CWE and vulnerabilities\", \"matching vulnerabilities\", \"asset inventory and CPE\", \"vulnerability detection and AI\", \"CVE and CPE by graph\", \"CVE and CPE by FM\" and \"VMS and vulnerability detection\".  
As shown below in Figures 1 and 2, the research method consisted of four procedures to gather the most significant papers related to our subject. The first stage involves gathering and building a global overview of the scientific contributions found in the literature review. Next, this study initially retrieved 846 papers from the academic libraries. By eliminating duplicates and out-of-scope papers, and classifying the publications using the abstract and title, the paper number was reduced to 487 papers. Then, 256 articles were selected by using predetermined criteria relevant to our topic. The following criteria were adopted:  
* Papers published within the last 8 years;
* Relevant papers according to the research question posed previously;
* Papers suggesting vulnerability detection methods;* Methods leveraging the usage of basic security metadata or AI techniques;
* Papers offering well-documented research on the proposed methods.  
To provide unbiased research, the analysis was limited to academic contributions focusing on the described methods relative to our topic. Ultimately, data analysis results (125 articles) were separated into two studies: the main study, which conducts a thorough and deep investigation of the article's content, and the connected study, which is sufficiently investigated to derive further insights and future contributions.  
Thus, the previously used methodology framed our study to find pertinent papers according to our research topic. In the following section, we will present motivation, some basic cybersecurity concepts, and an overview of security events published in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD).  
Figure 1: Process of the methodology used in the literature review.  
Figure 2: Distribution by year of the analysis study.