Ordered Weighted Averaging Operators 1988-2014: A Citation-Based Literature Survey

This study surveys the Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) operator literature using a citation network analysis. The main goals are the historical reconstruction of scientific development of the OWA field, the identification of the dominant direction of knowledge accumulation that emerged since the publication of the first OWA paper and to discover the most active lines of research. The results suggest, as expected, that Yager (1988) [Yager, Ronald R. On ordered weighted averaging aggregation operators in multicriteria decision making. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 18(1), 183–190.] is the most influential paper and the starting point of all other research using OWA. Starting from his contribution other lines of research developed and we describe them.