Mapping development of linguistic decision making studies

The purpose of this study is to identify the current research status on linguistic decision making through visualization method. The effective information visualization tool called CiteSpace was used to dig out how the research of linguistic decision making was conducted. A number of 2017 documents published between 1980 and 2015 were downloaded via Web of Science with the keyword linguistic decision making was used for topic search. The reference co-citation network was mapped to explore the reprehensive documents and research clusters in linguistic decision making area. The author co-citation network was generated to reveal the influential scholars in this area. The journal co-citation map was formulated to identify the dominant journals. The category network was mapped to excavate the most popular research category in linguistic decision making area. The results of this study have great significance to the researchers in linguistic fuzzy set, linguistic decision making and linguistic group decision making areas.