Study maps a decade of sustainability-focused decision-making research

A new bibliometric analysis has charted how research on multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) applied to sustainability problems has grown and diversified over the past decade.

The scale of the growth is striking. The corpus expanded from just 50 articles in 2015 to 471 in 2025, a compound annual growth rate of roughly 25 percent, and accumulated 101,854 Web of Science citations along the way. MCDM methods are used to resolve sustainability-related problems in which different alternatives must be assessed against conflicting criteria, making the field a practical bridge between environmental goals and structured decision analysis.

Geographically, the analysis shows the field is heavily concentrated in Asia and the Middle East. China, Iran, Turkey and India together produced 62.2 percent of the corpus, underlining how strongly sustainability-oriented decision research has taken root in these countries. Methodologically, two techniques dominated: the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and TOPSIS, both long-established approaches for ranking alternatives when criteria compete with one another.

Thematic clustering of the literature revealed four distinct research streams: spatial decision-making and energy siting; sustainability assessment and systems optimization; methods selection and management applications; and climate risks and vulnerabilities.

One of the study’s more revealing findings concerns vocabulary. Environmental and operational keywords prevailed in the lists of the most common keywords across the corpus, and no explicitly social keyword appeared among them. The author is careful to interpret this correctly: the absence signals a relatively low presence of the social dimension in the field’s dominant vocabulary, rather than its actual absence from the research itself. It is a distinction between how a field talks about its work and what that work actually contains.

The author also frames the study’s contribution with unusual candour. Rather than claiming completeness, the paper emphasises a critical and transparent demarcation of the bibliometric corpus: the boundaries of the search strategy are stated explicitly, and a consistent distinction is maintained throughout between bibliometric evidence and thematic interpretation. In a field where reviews often blur what the data show and what the analyst reads into them, that separation is presented as the study’s main contribution.

For researchers entering the area, the analysis offers a practical map of where the literature has concentrated and which methods carry the most weight.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric and thematic analysis of sustainability-oriented multi-criteria decision-making research

Article Title: Bibliometric and thematic analysis characterises sustainability oriented multi criteria decision making research in selected web of science categories

Article References: Yilmaz, F. (2026). Bibliometric and thematic analysis characterises sustainability oriented multi criteria decision making research in selected web of science categories. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-05176-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-05176-4

Keywords: bibliometrics, multi-criteria decision-making, sustainability, Web of Science, AHP, TOPSIS, thematic analysis, energy siting, climate risks, research trends, Bibliometric, thematic