A Bibliometric Analysis of Fuzzy Decision Research During 1970-2015

Fuzzy set just past its 50-year anniversary and different fuzzy associations and organizations hold different forms of conferences and activities to celebrate this epoch-making scientific discovery. As an important branch of fuzzy theory, fuzzy decision has attracted scholars from almost all fields from psychologists, economists, to computer scientists. In this paper, we conduct a bibliometric analysis on fuzzy decision-related research to find out some underlying patterns and dynamics in this research direction. A total of 13,901 fuzzy decision-related publication records from Web of Science are analyzed with the aid of the textmining software Vantage Point. Many interesting results with regard to the annual trends, the top players in terms of country level, time dynamic as well as institutional level, the publishing journals, the highly cited papers, and the research landscape are yielded and explained in-depth. It is observed that some small or developing economies ( such as China, Iran, Taiwan, and Turkey) are quite active in fuzzy decision research. The fuzzy decision theories and methods have increasingly be utilized in various fields evidenced by the growing number of disciplines involved in the fuzzy decision research.