A comprehensive bibliometric analysis of uncertain group decision making from 1980 to 2019

Uncertain group decision making (UGDM) has been a hot research direction over the years. In this paper, according to VOS viewer and CiteSpace, we make a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of UGDM during the last four decades, namely from 1980 to 2019. After data preprocessing, 4,887 publications related to UGDM are obtained from the Web of Science (WoS). Considering numbers, citations and cooperation of publications, general analysis is explored on the basis of bibliometric indicators at the levels of countries/regions, institutions and authors. In order to investigate the development of UGDM, we present cooperation network in the whole period of time and the dynamic networks during the four sub-periods. After that, some deep researches are conducted by bibliometric analysis, such as burst detection analysis, co-occurrence analysis, timeline view analysis and bibliographic coupling analysis. Based on which, further discussions are provided, including current challenges and possible directions. Finally, some main findings are summarized from three aspects, and the advantages and disadvantages of methods in this paper are concluded. This paper explores the hot topics and development trends of UGDM, which offers an important reference for future research. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.