Researching the development of Atanassov intuitionistic fuzzy set: Using a citation network analysis

Since Atanassov presented the intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) in 1983, a great amount of extended content has been made by experts in IFS field and then the citations of a more formal paper, which developed from the first proposal and was presented in 1986, have been cited over 4000 times in Google Scholar ending November 6, 2014. However, the research on the development track of this discipline has not caused extensive attention among scholars in this discipline. Therefore, in this paper, we plan to determine the development track of this discipline based on some statistics and network analysis methodologies, as a new attempt. Note that we only take the citation information on IFSs ending November 6, 2014 into account. Therefore all of the data in this paper have time restriction. We derive a historical graph about the development course of IFS and use some basic statistics to identify some influential journals, authors, etc. Then we analyze a small range of influential literatures based on the SNA (social network analysis) theory to figure out the position of several cardinal IFS literatures. As result suggests, Atanassov [1] is the most influential paper in IFS field. Most literatures referring to IFS cited this paper and on the basis of it, increasingly scholars combine other subjects with IFS subject. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.