Detecting and Visualizing in the Field of Hesitant Fuzzy Sets: A Bibliometric Analysis from 2009 to 2018

Hesitant fuzzy set, initiated 10 years ago, is an effective tool to deal with uncertain and vague information considering hesitancy when evaluating alternatives. It allows people to hesitate among several possible values for the membership degree to a given set. Hesitant fuzzy set has attracted a large number of researchers’ attention and has obtained great achievements up to now. Because of this expansion, we provide a comprehensive bibliometric overview on hesitant fuzzy sets with the objective of presenting a clear perspective to the field of hesitant fuzzy sets. A total of 484 publications retrieved from the core database of Web of Science are analyzed in detail. Many interesting results in terms of general statistics, top players with regard to country/region level, institute level, journal level, author level, highly cited papers and research topics are investigated. Two bibliometric software packages, VOSviewer and CiteSpace, help us to make visualization maps. It is hoped that our study can give insights into the historical context of HFSs and help researchers be aware of the significant advances in this field.