Forty years of Fuzzy Sets and Systems: A bibliometric analysis

Fuzzy Sets and Systems is a leading international journal in computer science and applied mathematics that was created in 1978. In 2018, the journal celebrated its 40th anniversary. The aim of this study is to present a bibliometric overview of the leading trends occurring in the journal between 1978 and 2016 by analysing the most productive and influential authors, institutions and countries as well as the publication and citation structure. Additionally, this work presents a graphical visualization of the bibliographic data by using the visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer and the science mapping analysis tool (SciMAT) software. The results show the strong growth of fuzzy set theory over time and a huge diversity of publications from all over the world, especially from Europe, North America and East Asia.