Consensus in a fuzzy environment: a bibliometric study

Abstract

In today's organizations, group decision making has become a part of everyday organizational life. It involves multiple individuals interacting to reach a decision. An important question here is the level of agreement or consensus achieved among the individuals before making the decision. Traditionally, consensus has been meant to be a full and unanimous agreement. However, it is often not reachable in practice. A more reasonable approach is the use of softer consensus measures, which assess the consensus in a more flexible way, reflecting the large spectrum of possible partial agreements and guiding the discussion process until widespread agreement is achieved. As soft consensus measures are more human-consistent in the sense that they better reflect a real human perception of the essence of consensus, consensus models based on these kind of measures have been widely proposed. The aim of this contribution is to present a bibliometric study performed on the consensus approaches that have been proposed in a fuzzy environment. It gives an overview about the research products gathered in this research field. To do so, several points have been studied, among others: countries, journals, top contributing authors, most cited keywords, papers and authors. This allows us to show a quick shot of the state of the art in this research area. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.