Evolution of multi-criteria analysis: A scientometric analysis

The field of multi-criteria analysis has known very important developments during the last 20 years, if one considers the very large amount of activities that it has generated and continues to generate (papers in journals, a dedicated journal, books, meetings, applications, ...). Even if multi-criteria analysis has reached some maturity, its future is subject to questions and debate among its researchers: what is the evolution of the field? What is its structure? Is it integrating new topics? In order to answer such questions at least partially, we have studied multi-criteria analysis literature by means of the method of associated words (scientometric analysis) and the software ‘Leximappe’. All the abstracts of the papers which are relative to multi-criteria analysis and are included in the bibliographic ABI-INFORM database from 1985 to 1996 have been analysed. In this paper, we will present some results of this study.