Tracing knowledge diffusion of TOPSIS: A historical perspective from citation network

• Published in: Expert systems with applications 2021-04, Vol.168, p.114238, Article 114238
• Main Authors: Yu, Dejian, Pan, Tianxing
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Citation analysis; Clustering; Historical analysis; Knowledge structure; Main path analysis; Social networks; Technology assessment; TOPSIS
• ISSN: 0957-4174; 1873-6793
• DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2020.114238

•Main path analysis is conducted to detect the development trajectories.•The knowledge diffusion in the domain is probed from a historical perspective.•The research content in the same research topic such as logistics has changed.•Clustering and multiple main paths are integrated to provide a rounded analysis. A citation network technology named main path analysis is used in this study, which provides a historical perspective of Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). The citations between related papers are regarded as edges in social network and the corresponding weights are allocated according to their role in knowledge diffusion. Several different main paths are implemented in this work to investigate the knowledge structure of TOPSIS. The Louvain clustering algorithm is conjoined with main path analysis to present the development trend in several scientific communities. The visualization of multiple main paths shows the overall knowledge structure instead of a single development trajectory. This is the first article to use this unique method to process such large-scale data in the TOPSIS domain, which provides an insightful view of TOPSIS publications for future research.