The contributions of multi-criteria decision making to the development of decision support systems subspecialties: An empirical investigation

This study focuses on examining the structure of decision support systems (DSS) research, with a particular emphasis on assessing the contributions of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) to the development of each of the DSS subspecialty areas. This study traces how concepts and findings by researchers in the MCDM area have been picked up by DSS researchers to be applied, extended and refined in the development of DSS research subspecialties. In doing so, factor analysis is applied to an author cocitation frequency matrix derived from a large database file of comprehensive DSS literature. This study concludes that researchers in the MCDM area have made crucial contributions to the development of DSS research subspecialties.