An overview of probabilistic preference decision-making based on bibliometric analysis

Probabilistic preference decision-making (PPDM) is a branch of uncertain decision-making, which identifies decision-makers’ preferences with probability to deal with uncertain decision-making problems more comprehensively. In order to understand the status and development process of publications related to PPDM, this paper conducts a bibliometric study. Based on the Web of Science (WoS) core collection, a total of 487 publications are obtained. Firstly, this paper makes a general analysis of the basic characteristics of PPDM, including the type of articles, the number of annual publications and the research directions. Secondly, according to the information of the country/region/institution/author/journal regarding the publications, the publication structure is analyzed, the most productive items are explored, and the partnership of each item is detected with the VOSviewer. The paper then examines the citation structure of PPDM publications, uses the VOSviewer to visualize the citation network and discusses the most influential items. Finally, VOSviewer and Bibliometrix are used to analyze the keywords and study the work focus and current hot topics of PPDM. The keywords are divided into three stages in chronological order to analyze the development trend and theme evolution of the research topics. Based on a series of analyses, we further discuss the characteristics of PPDM publications, give some reasonable suggestions and draw some main conclusions. This research thoroughly analyzes and summarizes the essential features, research status and development trend of PPDM publications, which is helpful for the interested researchers to carry out further scientific research.