Global Research Performance on the Design and Applications of Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Systems: A Bibliometric Analysis

There has been a significant contribution to scientific literature in the design and applications of Type-2 fuzzy logic systems (T2FLS). The T2FLSs found applications in many aspects of our daily lives, such as engineering, pure science, medicine and social sciences. The online web of science was searched to identify the 100 most frequently cited papers published on the design and application of T2FLS from 1980 to 2016. The articles were analyzed based on authorship, source title, country of origin, institution, document type, web of science category, and year of publication. The correlation between the average citation per year (ACY) and the total citation (TC) was analyzed. It was found that there is a strong relationship between the ACY and TC (r = 0.91643, P<0.01), based on the papers consider in this research.  The “Type -2 fuzzy sets made simple” authored by Mendel and John (2002), published in IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems received the highest TC as well as the ACY. The future trend in this research domain was also analyzed. The present analysis may serve as a guide for selecting qualitative literature especially to the beginners in the field of T2FLS