Visualizing the Intellectual Structure of the Fuzzy Linguistic Knowledge Domain: A Bibliometric Analysis

Ever since the 1970s when the idea of fuzzy linguistic variable was introduced by L. Zadeh, it has been heatedly discussed and widely used in engineering, information science, and many other research fields. With the rapid development and use, thousands of papers have been published on fuzzy linguistic, detailing both theoretical development and application-oriented studies, being a very important area in the Computational Intelligence field. Considering this massive document material over the past decades, the main purpose of this study is to explore the knowledge structure and citation landscape in this field based on scientometrics and bibliometrics. The document data used in this study are obtained through a topic search from Web of Science, including 4350 original research and review articles. The intellectual structure of fuzzy linguistic knowledge domain is analyzed, such as countries and territories, research institutions, and authors. The bibliographic landscape is analyzed, identifying research themes and current research hotspots through document co-citation analysis and citation burst detection methods. The research results of this article remarkably benefit to our understanding of the fuzzy linguistic knowledge domain.

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