## 8 Conclusions and Future Directions  
This research offers a thorough bibliometric analysis of various aspects of OT security research published from 2018 to 2024. This report reviewed annual publications classified by type, organization, source, researcher, country, and area. Additionally, an extensive analysis was carried out from co-authorship, co-occurrence, and citation perspectives, and fractional counting was applied for co-authorship, co-citation, and co-occurrence evaluations. Finally, the burst detection results were examined to pinpoint the most popular publications and keywords over time. Below is a summary of the principal findings of this investigation:  
1. OT not only deals with data processing but also with managing different industrial processes and technologies. Thus, the increasing number of threats both to classical IT and OT causes the demand for mitigating OT-related risks, which may cause both cybersecurity and even human safety-related impacts. Despite that, there is still no clear understanding in academic society and industry of the differences between OT and other interrelated terms, such as SCADA and ICSs. This is clearly seen later in the keyword distribution analysis, in which OT is not even in the Top 10. Due to that reason, the performed search was expanded to include the abovementioned and related technologies. 2. In the analyzed period 2017-2024, 1124 publications were indexed in WoS, with 51.5% belonging to the conference proceeding papers and approximately 45.7% to the research articles in research journals. The percentage of review articles remains low. There has been a publication number growth tendency since 2017, showing the importance of the topic, with some potential slow-down in 2024, that can be explained by not yet fully indexed data. 3. _'Lecture Notes in Computer Science'_, _'IEEE Access'_, and _'Computers and Security'_ publish the highest number of articles on the topic. The majority of publications are indexed in 'Computer Sciences', 'Engineering', and 'Telecommunication' areas. Distribution by WoS categories gives 'Computer Science Information Systems', 'Engineering Electrical Electronics', and 'Computer Science Theory Methods' on top. More than one-third of publications are published under open-access licenses, demonstrating the demand for this type of scientific knowledge sharing. 4. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Singapore University of Technology, and State University of Florida are leading institutions by the number of publications on the topic. Furthermore, the PRC and the USA remain the leading nations by the total number of publications. A correlation can be seen between the top funding agencies, i.e., NSCS (PRC) and NSF (USA), and EU funds (EU). Still, EU nations are not top by the number of publications, which can be explained by the fact that EU countries are counted separately. Noticeable and potentially growing nations would be Singapore, India, and France. 5. We identified the most active authors by the number of publications, as well as by the number of references and citing bursts, which can be recommended for monitoring by the researchers, working or starting to work on the OT security topic. 6. The majority of publications belong to the Conference Proceedings Citation Index--Science (CPCI-S) index in the WoS database, followed by the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED). The Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) indexed the third highest quantity of published papers, but the number of indexed papers already differs by order. Distribution can be explained by researchers' interest in making quick publishing in case of conferences or publishing research in highly ranked journals. Still, the publishing burst analysis demonstrates the ongoing shift from proceedings to journals in the last two years. * Analysis of collaboration links has shown that the current collaboration level remains low, and collaboration possibilities are not yet fully utilized. Current research groups are fragmented and formed by a limited number of researchers.