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Twenty years of Soft Computing: a bibliometric overview

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Abstract

The journal Soft Computing was launched in 1997, and it is dedicated to promote advancements in soft computing theories, which includes fuzzy sets theory, neural networks, evolutionary computation, probabilistic reasoning and hybrid theories. 2017 marks the 20th anniversary of the journal. Motivated by this anniversary, this study presents a bibliometric analysis of the current publications in the journal in order to identify the leading trends ruling the journal. The paper also develops a mapping analysis of the bibliographic material by using the visualization of similarities viewer software. The results show that researchers from all over the world publish regularly in the journal. Soft Computing is growing significantly during the last years, becoming one of the leading journals in the field.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Vincenzo Loia and the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments that have improved the quality of the paper. Support from the Chilean Government through the Fondecyt Regular program (Project Number 1160286) and the FEDER funds under grant TIN2016-75850-R are gratefully acknowledged.

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Correspondence to José M. Merigó or Enrique Herrera-Viedma.

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Communicated by A. Di Nola.

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Merigó, J.M., Cobo, M.J., Laengle, S. et al. Twenty years of Soft Computing: a bibliometric overview. Soft Comput 23, 1477–1497 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-018-3168-z

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