Group decision making and soft consensus - Analyzing citation classics by means of H-Classics.

Citation classics provide a view on the documents that could be considered the basis of a scientific area and that have therefore attracted historical and great interest by the researchers. Because of the potential relation that can be established between quality research and citation counts, the identification of citation classics also is a main way used to carry out a methodical assessment of research performance. In recent times, the H-Classics, a methodology that is founded on the popular h-index, has been introduced to determine the highly cited papers. This research aims to provide an insight into the development of soft consensus in group decision making via H-Classics. Particularly, we identify both the scientific actors (researchers, institutions, countries, and journals) making the biggest research contribution to the development of this scientific area and the topics covered.