  Extending knowledge by identifying and investigating valuable research
questions and problems is a core function of research. Research publications
often suggest avenues for future work to extend and build upon their results.
Considering these suggestions can contribute to developing research ideas that
build upon previous work and produce results that tie into existing knowledge.
Usable security and privacy researchers commonly add future work statements to
their publications. However, our community lacks an in-depth understanding of
their prevalence, quality, and impact on future research.
  Our work aims to address this gap in the research literature. We reviewed all
27 papers from the 2019 SOUPS proceedings and analyzed their future work
statements. Additionally, we analyzed 978 publications that cite any paper from
SOUPS 2019 proceedings to assess their future work statements' impact. We find
that most papers from the SOUPS 2019 proceedings include future work
statements. However, they are often unspecific or ambiguous, and not always
easy to find. Therefore, the citing publications often matched the future work
statements' content thematically, but rarely explicitly acknowledged them,
indicating a limited impact. We conclude with recommendations for the usable
security and privacy community to improve the utility of future work statements
by making them more tangible and actionable, and avenues for future work.
