A Bibliometric Overview and Visualization of the International Journal of Fuzzy Systems Between 2007 and 2017 Ming Tang 1 • Huchang Liao 1 • Shun-Feng Su 2 Received: 30 January 2018 / Revised: 10 March 2018 / Accepted: 15 March 2018 / Published online: 22 March 2018 Ó Taiwan Fuzzy Systems Association and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract The International Journal of Fuzzy Systems (IJFS) is an influential journal in the field of fuzzy systems. In this paper, a bibliometric overview of the IJFS publi- cations downloaded from the Web of Science is provided. The purpose of this paper is to identify the conceptual evolution and the development situation of the journal. To do this, first the annual trends of publications and citations, sources that citing IJFS papers and the most highly cited papers in IJFS are presented. Then, the influential coun- tries, institutes and authors are discussed in details. Next, keywords of IJFS including author keywords and global keywords are analyzed. Furthermore, the co-authorship status of IJFS publications is investigated. Finally, the co- citation analyses including the document co-citation, the author co-citation and the institute co-citation are offered. Keywords Bibliometrics Á Citations Á Keywords Á Co- authorship Á Co-citation 1 Introduction The International Journal of Fuzzy Systems (IJFS) is an international journal in the field of fuzzy systems, soft computing systems, gray systems and extension theory systems ranging from software to hardware. Its first pub- lication appeared in 1999. IJFS has been included in the well-known database, Web of Science (WoS), since 2007. In its first publication year in 1999, there are only two issues with 14 papers. During 2000–2015, IJFS published four issues every year (except 2001 with three issues). In the last 2 years, IJFS published six issues. Starting from 2018, IJFS will publish eight issues per year. Nowadays, IJFS’s publications have wide distribution to researchers and practitioners. Bibliometric refers to the cross-disciplinary science of quantitative analysis by means of statistical and science mapping methods [1]. It is widely used in identifying the general outline and development of a certain field [2, 3]. It started from the work of Cole and Eale [4] in the early twentieth century. Up to now, bibliometric has been applied to keywords analysis [5], co-authorship analysis [6], co-citation analysis [7] and coupling analysis [8]. In bibliometrics, performance analysis and science mapping are two important methods to analyze the status of a certain field [9]. Performance analysis mainly includes citation analysis and literature distributions in terms of journals, countries, institutes and authors. Science mapping uses various visualization methods to present information directly. Many kinds of software have been designed for science mapping. VOSviewer, developed by Eck and Waltman [10], is a powerful tool in the field of biblio- metrics. The VOSviewer is used for analyzing various indices in this study. Bibliometrics has been widely used in various fields like healthcare [11], energy management [12], software engi- neering [13] and fuzzy theory [14–16]. In addition to a specific field, some studies of bibliometrics also focused on a certain journal. For instance, Merigo ´ et al. [17] provided a bibliometric review for International Journal of Intelli- gent Systems from 1986 to 2015. Cancino et al. [18] pre- sented a bibliometric analysis for Computers & Industrial & Huchang Liao liaohuchang@163.com 1 Business School, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610064, China 2 Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan 123 Int. J. Fuzzy Syst. (2018) 20(5):1403–1422 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40815-018-0484-5