A bibliometric analysis of neutrosophic set: two decades review from 1998 to 2017

Neutrosophic set, initiated by Smarandache, is a novel tool to deal with vagueness considering the truth-membership T, indeterminacy-membership I and falsity-membership F satisfying the condition \(0\le T+I+F\le 3\). It can be used to characterize the uncertain information more sufficiently and accurately than intuitionistic fuzzy set. Neutrosophic set has attracted great attention of many scholars that have been extended to new types and these extensions have been used in many areas such as aggregation operators, decision making, image processing, information measures, graph and algebraic structures. Because of such a growth, we present an overview on neutrosophic set with the aim of offering a clear perspective on the different concepts, tools and trends related to their extensions. A total of 137 neutrosophic set publication records from Web of Science are analyzed. Many interesting results with regard to the annual trends, the top players in terms of country level as well as institutional level, the publishing journals, the highly cited papers, and the research landscape are yielded and explained in-depth. The results indicate that some developing economics (such as China, India, Turkey) are quite active in neutrosophic set research. Moreover, the co-authorship analysis of the country and institution, the co-citation analysis of the journal, reference and author, and the co-occurrence analysis of the keywords are presented by VOSviewer software.