Hesitant Fuzzy Sets: A Bibliometric Study

Abstract

Different theories and methodologies have been originated as a consequence of the necessity of managing uncertainty in real world contexts. Several tools handling uncertainty in various types of situations have been provided by the fuzzy sets together with their extensions, for instance, interval-valued fuzzy sets, type-2 fuzzy sets, Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy sets, and so on. In the recent past, a novel extension of the fuzzy sets was proposed to address hesitant situations that are badly managed by the existing tools. This novel extension is the so-called hesitant fuzzy set and, since its appearance, numerous researchers have focused their attention on it. As a consequence, various extensions and different operators to deal with such kind of information have been developed and, in addition, diverse applications have been proposed. Due to this quick growth, this work shows a bibliometric study on hesitant fuzzy sets with the purpose of presenting an overview of the research findings gathered in this recent extension of fuzzy sets. In particular, the following points are studied: top contributing journals, authors and countries of affiliation, and most cited documents, authors and keywords.