# Local Government Cybersecurity Landscape: A Systematic Review and Conceptual Framework
## 3 Research Design
We executed the search within titles, abstracts, and keywords in mid-July 2023 in the following databases: Scopus, Taylor and Francis Online, IEEE Xplore, Wiley Online Library, Sage, ScienceDirect, Proquest, Directory of Open Access Journals, and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Library Collection. We opted for a multi-database strategy because of the limited availability of scholarly publications, as indicated in numerous studies. Therefore, we expanded our search for scholarly articles to include university (QUT) library collections in addition to public databases. We did not set a publication year filter to identify a trend in the research interest in this field. Initially, 3861 articles appeared in the search across all databases. However, to ensure high-quality sources and increase academic acceptance, we executed the primary inclusion and exclusion criteria as described in Table 1. In this study, we only considered academic journal articles that underwent a peer review, were published in English, and were available online in full text. We excluded books, chapters, reports, editorials, conference proceedings, and publications that did not meet the primary inclusion criteria listed in Table 1 from our search results. The number of selected articles was substantially reduced to 642. This exclusion was important to maintain a focus on peer-reviewed journal articles, which typically offer a more rigorous and detailed examination. We suspected that some articles might have appeared in multiple databases. Therefore, we eliminated duplicates (\(n=154\)), resulting in a reduction in the total number of articles to 488. All these articles were 'eye-balled' for consistency and accuracy [41; 42] with the research keywords and category formulation criteria presented in Table 2. Following this preliminary screening, 365 articles were eliminated, leaving 123 articles eligible for a second screening. We re-evaluated these articles based on the secondary inclusion and exclusion criteria, as described in Table 1. As per the secondary inclusion criteria, we refined our selection to articles that addressed cybersecurity issues involving local governments, regardless of whether they mentioned smart cities. We also included articles that discussed cybersecurity in the context of smart cities, regardless of whether they indicated a central or local \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c} \hline \hline
**Selection Criteria** \\ \hline Selection of relevant articles using eye-balling techniques \\ Classification of the selected literature works based on their relevance to cybersecurity issues in local governments and/or smart \\ cities focusing on local governments’ administrative role \\ Identification of data that local governments store and manage \\ Identification and categorization of the type of cyber-attacks in local governments \\ Determination of the purposes/motivations of cyber-attacks and the type of attackers \\ Identification and classification of barriers to cybersecurity and recommended solutions \\ Identification of cybersecurity tools and assessment frameworks and standards \\ Validation and justification of the classification \\ Organize the reviewed literature into the relevant classifications \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 2: Category formulation criteria. Figure 2: A screenshot of the search query (executed in Scopus). governmental role. In contrast, the secondary exclusion criteria eliminated articles that focused on subjects outside of the areas specified in the secondary inclusion criteria. The execution of primary and secondary inclusion and exclusion criteria is a common practice in the PRISMA protocol adopted by many researchers [29; 30; 41; 42; 43; 44]. This approach played a crucial role in our study by eliminating the irrelevant literature and focusing on the most relevant articles that provided valuable information about the cybersecurity landscape in local governments.