Knowledge Diffusion Trajectories in the Hesitant Fuzzy Domain in the Past Decade: A Citation-Based Analysis

The past decade has witnessed the rapid growth in the hesitant fuzzy domain. To provide an in-depth discussion, based on the retrieved 1080 papers from the Web of Science (WoS), this paper first investigates what topics are the research interested in and how they have changed over the past decade in the hesitant fuzzy area. Main path analysis is adopted further to identify the most influential connections between papers and analyze the knowledge diffusion trajectories in the past decade, including the local and global main paths and the key-route main path. The results show that there are five hot topics which are decision-making, information measure, aggregation operator, extensions of HFS and preference relation. Among them, decision-making and extensions of HFS are two topics that are beginning more and more prevalent. The result of main path analysis consolidates the findings, showing that the application of hesitant fuzzy theory in the decision-making field has been and remains the most popular, and the object of the research has shifted to different types of HFSs being hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) the most remarkable one. This paper not only provides a framework to investigate the research in a certain field, but also provides an in-depth summary of the field to provide theoretical guidance for researchers and practitioners.