DSS in numbers.
Filip, Florin Gheorghe ; Suduc, Ana-Maria ; Bizoi, Mihai 等
Introduction
In Filip (2008), a DSS is defined as "an anthropocentric,
adaptive and evolving information system which is meant to implement the
functions of a team of assistants that would otherwise be necessary to
help the decision-maker to overcome his/her limits and constraints
he/she may encounter when trying to solve complex and complicated
decision problems that count". The DSS concept was anticipated by
the idealized vision of Licklider (1960) over the
"precognitive" man-computer systems, which were meant to
"[...] enable man and computers to co-operate on making decisions
and control complex situations [...]". According to McCosh (2002),
the term was first articulated by M. Scott-Morton in a seminar held in
February 1964. As many new concepts, DSS was received with enthusiasm by
a part of academia community and industry people. For example, Wagner
(1981), a pioneer in the DSS domain (Power 2013), hailed "the new
school of thought called DSS". At the same time, the term itself
and especially its usage were controversial. For example, Bonczek et al.
(1984), important contributors to the advancement of the DSS movement,
noticed that the term was abused as a "new label" placed on
various software products, in order to obtain a competitive advantage.
Moreover, Naylor (1982) claimed DSS is a "redundant term"
meant to describe a subsystem of MIS (Management Information System) and
it was not based on a conceptual framework. Ever since, both conceptual
advances and practical applications have confirmed the statement of
Vazsonyi (1982) that "DSS satisfies a real need and there is a
market for it". The remaining part of this paper aims at supporting
the above statement with respect to research activities as reflected in
the scientific literature to be found on the Internet.
According to Lawrence (2001), "the volume of scientific
literature typically far exceeds the ability of scientists to identify
and utilize all relevant information in their research". Many
international scientific databases offer, on each search performed, a
wide range of information (topics, authors, publications, etc.) which
may help the scientists to find the information they need for their
work. According to Suduc et al. (2010), this information is, usually,
quite comprehensive, to gain a quantitative wide perspective on the
research activity corresponding to the terms used to perform the search.
The use of this type of information provided by the scientific databases
is especially helpful to complete or to facilitate the structuring
various authors' knowledge in certain research fields.
The paper presents updated information and a comparison with the
data published in Suduc et al. (2010). Therefore, in the sequel, there
are presented figures of the research production in the DSS research
field, as they are reflected in three international scientific
databases: ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore Digital Library and ACM Digital
Library. The specific aim of this study is to identify the evolution in
time of the DSS research field, major research trends (research topics),
the most important DSS publications and so on.
1. Method
The DSS concept, launched before the existence of PCs, and the
corresponding research area (Alter 2002) have evolved in a strong
relation with the information systems developments and have diversified
over the years. The development of the web technologies has radically
transformed the design, development, implementation and the deployment
of the DSS (Bhargava et al. 2007). At present, the term Decision Support
Systems designates a wide class of systems which includes various types
of technologies and aims at supporting the decision-making activities.
To evaluate the evolution of the domain, a set of numerical data
related to the DSS materials published, are presented in the sequel,
since the beginning of the DSS research, the publications with the
greatest number of DSS materials and topics/subjects/keywords of the DSS
materials, as they are reflected in three relevant scientific databases,
in comparison with similar data obtained in 2010. The paper aims to
identify if the data provided by the scientific databases analysed are
useful for future authors and relevant for the research field.
One particular purpose of this study is to make a comparison
between the data obtained in November 2010 and those from September
2013, in order to identify the DSS research evolution during the years,
by analysing the numbers of the DSS published materials and a series of
related data. The method applied involved several queries on three
international research databases: ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore Digital
Library and ACM Digital Library.
The DSS-related search terms that were utilised to obtain a wide
perspective on the DSS research field are, in both analyses (2010 and
2013): "decision support system", "decision system",
"decision tool", "decision making system" and the
plural of these words. These concepts were considered to be the most
commonly used by researchers to refer to this type of systems.
Searches were made on all the materials (articles, books, reports,
etc.), contained in the selected scientific databases, that included at
least one of the above concepts in the title, abstract or keywords. The
decision to search the selected terms only within the title, abstract
and keywords was made after noticing that general searches (within any
field) also returned articles which were not relevant for DSS research
area. After all, the list of search terms was selected, so as to surely
obtain DSS relevant articles.
Since decision support systems are now viewed as a wide range of
specific, but very diversified information systems, many others terms,
that are relevant for DSS research area (e.g. data warehousing, OLAP,
data mining or business intelligence), were not considered for this
research.
The information presented in this paper about publication titles or
publication year was obtained by using filtering build-in options of the
scientific databases.
2. Results
To update the results of the search completed on the 12th of
November 2010 (Suduc et al. 2010), a new search was made at the
beginning of September 2013. The returned results indicate a
significantly higher number of published materials registered in the
selected scientific data bases, both expressed in absolute values (Fig.
1) and relative increase ratios (Table 1). Those global results will be
refined and commented in the sequel.
2.1. Evolution per decade
The evolution per decades of the DSS published materials shows an
almost exponential increasing interest for this type of systems. Figures
2, 3 and 4 present the evolution of DSS materials, per decade, until
2010, in ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore Digital Library and ACM Digital
Library, respectively, as it was reported in 2010 and 2013. The
databases reported also a wide number of DSS materials published between
2011 and 2013 (1236 in ACM Digital Library, 3100 in Science Direct and
3420 in IEEE Xplore Digital Library).
It is interesting to notice that the databases were updated not
only with newly published materials, but also with materials which were
published in the past, since the beginning of the reported period. For
example, in ScienceDirect there were reported, in 2013 compared to 2010,
15 more articles published before 1970 and, in IEEE Xplore Digital
Library, 20 articles.
The dynamics of the scientific databases content includes not only
additions, but also removals. For example, in Science Direct, in 2013,
there were fewer articles published before 1970 than in 2010.
2.2. Yearly production
Figure 5 presents a comparison between the results obtained in 2010
and 2013, related to the evolution of the DSS published materials over
the last 10 years and 13 years, respectively.
The results of this comparison indicate that:
1. The DSS research production kept the ascendant trend;
2. In IEEE Xplore Digital Library, the indexing rate of the DSS
materials is higher than in Science Direct (unlike 2010, in 2013, the
results show that the IEEE Xplore Digital Library line is above the
Science Direct line, with a higher number of published materials per
year);
3. ACM Digital Library, compared to Science Direct and IEEE Xplore
Digital Library, reported a slow decrease of DSS articles over the last
three years. This might be caused by a lower indexing rate. The authors
of this paper consider that this result has another explanation than a
lower interest of scientists in this research area (e.g. a low indexing
rate of the ACM Digital Library).
2.3. Relevant topics
In 2010, all the three searched scientific databases included a
refinement criterion by "topics" (ScienceDirect),
"subject" (IEEE Xplore Digital Library) or by "discovered
terms" (ACM Digital Library), showing a list of the most frequently
encountered topics/subjects/discovered terms. These lists were quite
useful in discovering the main research topics in DSS area. A search
performed per decades (Suduc et al. 2010) indicated the evolution of
scientists' interest on decision support systems, which were quite
useful for gaining a wide perspective on DSS evolution in time.
Unfortunately, in 2013, only Science Direct still included such an
option, the other two databases gave up providing this type of search
refinement.
In 2010, the several main topics/most used terms identified by the
databases were: "decision support", "decision support
systems", "DS", "decision making", "expert
systems", "group decision support systems", "health
care", "neural networks", "supply chain". These
identified terms indicate several DSS key terms and also some DSS
application fields.
Arnott and Pervan (2008), who carried out a long-term project meant
to critically analyse the academic field of decision support systems
based on the content analysis of 1093 DSS articles published in 14 major
journals from 1990 to 2004, published a list of major DSS subfields,
such as: "personal decision support systems", "group
support systems", "negotiation support systems",
"intelligent decision support systems", "knowledge
management-based DSS", "data warehousing",
"enterprise reporting", "analysis systems".
[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]
Sub-searches in the databases by these subfields and the main DSS
terms/topics/subjects identified in 2010, led to the results presented
in Table 2. The order of the searched terms is the occurrence order of
these terms, from the most used to the less used.
The results show that the most used terms within the articles in
the DSS field are:
--"decision-making" (93.65% articles in Science Direct
include this term, 26.24% in IEEE Xplore Digital Library and 44.17% in
ACM Digital Library);
--"decision support systems" (25,07% articles in Science
Direct, 90.09% in IEEE Xplore Digital Library and 59.89% in ACM Digital
Library).
Other quite often encountered terms are:
--"expert systems", that is a very popular DSS thread
from about 1965 to the mid-1990s (Power 2007);
--"management systems", which is not a surprising issue,
since most of decision support systems are meant to support managers;
--"health care", that is a very important field where
there is a growing interest in the use of DSS (named clinical decision
support systems) (Osheroff et al. 2007) which have been shown to improve
both patient outcomes and the cost of care (Berner, La Lande 2007).
The search of the other terms, such as "group decision support
systems", "data warehouse", "business
intelligence" and "intelligent decision support systems",
within the initial results, although relevant for the DSS research
field, didn't return very good results (less than 8% of the total
number of DSS materials from the analysed scientific databases). An
explanation might be that these terms are categories which are often
used in other forms. For example, for "group decision support
systems" other terms, such as "group support systems" or
"electronic meeting systems", are used.
2.4. Relevant publications
Table 3 presents the first ten publications
(journals/books/proceedings) indicated, both in 2010 and in 2013, by the
scientific databases, as containing the highest number of DSS research
papers. The results show that, comparing with 2010 study results, the
top ten publications partially changed in 2013. The least changed is the
top ten in ScienceDirect which has 8 publications in common with the one
from 2010. The ACM Digital Library top has 6 publications in common and
IEEE Xplore Digital Library, 5 publications. Also, it can be noticed
that all the numbers obtained in 2013 are higher, compared to the ones
obtained in 2010.
The journal with the highest number of articles is Decision Support
System, with 978 articles in ACM Digital Library (the first place in top
ten) and 351 articles in ScienceDirect (the third place). The second
publication with the highest number of DSS articles indexed in the
selected scientific databases is Expert Systems with Applications, with
466 articles indexed in ScienceDirect and 406 in ACM Digital Library.
Others publications in top ten reported both by ScienceDirect and ACM
Digital Library are: Information and Management, Computers and
Industrial Engineering and Environmental Modelling & Software.
The fact that two databases returned five common publications in
top 10 leads us to the conclusion that these reported journals are
really relevant for the DSS research field.
Conclusions
The results presented in this paper indicate, by comparison with
similar data previously published in Suduc et al. (2010), the steadily
increasing interest in the research area of decision support systems,
the research trends over the last decade, some DSS main concepts and
application domains, the journals and conference proceedings with the
highest number of DSS research papers in DSS research field. These data
are presented as they are reflected by three scientific databases:
ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore Digital Library and ACM Digital Library and
analysed so as to determine their relevance for DSS field.
W. T. Lord Kelvin (1824-1906), the famous British mathematician,
physicist and engineer, firmly stated in its lecture entitled
"Electrical Units of Measurements", held on 13th May 1883,
"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about
and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you
cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and
unsatisfactory kind" (Shell 1998). However, there are also other
opinions about the compulsoriness of expressing the knowledge in
numbers. Many centuries ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-48 B.C.), a
reputed Roman orator, wisely stated (Cicero 1913): "Non enim numero
haec judicantur, sed pondere" ("The number does not matter,
the quality does").
The authors of this paper think that, even though the results
presented above have a certain indicative relevance, a deeper analysis
of the published paper content may bring in even more useful insights
for the researcher. Since the DSS domain is already very broad and the
results reported are quite diversified, sectorial studies addressing
specific application domains may be feasible, useful, usable and
eventually used.
Caption: Fig. 5. DSS research yearly production: a) data obtained
in 2010); b) data obtained in 2013
doi:10.3846/20294913.2014.890139
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Suduc, A.-M.; Bizoi, M.; Cioca, M.; Filip, F. G. 2010. Evolution of
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Received 27 October 2013; accepted 05 November 2013
Florin Gheorghe FILIP (a), Ana-Maria SUDUC (b), Mihai BIZOI (b)
(a) Romanian Academy: BAR, INCE, and ICI, Bucharest, Romania
(b) Valahia University of Targoviste, Targoviste, Romania
Corresponding author Florin Gheorghe Filip
E-mail: ffilip@acad.ro
Florin Gheorghe FILIP took his MSc and PhD in Control Engineering
from the TU "Politehnica" of Bucharest. In 1991 he was elected
as a Member of the Romanian Academy (RA). He has been a Scientific
Researcher at the National R&D Institute in Informatics (ICI) of
Bucharest since 1970. Currently, he is a Part-Time Researcher at the
National Institute of Economic Researches (INCE) of the RA, also the
Director of the Library of the Academy. He was elected as Vice-President
of RA in 2000 and re-elected in 2002 and 2006. His main scientific
interests include large-scale systems, decision support systems,
technology management and foresight.
Ana-Maria SUDUC took her PhD in Computer Science from Romanian
Academy. Currently, she is a Lecturer at Automatic Control, Informatics
and Electrical Engineering Department, Valahia University of Targoviste.
Her current research interests include interfaces for decision support
systems, group decision support systems, and web interfaces.
Mihai BIZOI took his PhD in Computer Science from Romanian Academy.
Currently, he is a Lecturer at Automatic Control, Informatics and
Electrical Engineering Department, Valahia University of Targoviste. His
current research interests include communications-driven decision
support systems, group decision support systems, and web collaborative
technologies.
Table 1. Numbers of DSS materials indexed in international
databases--comparison November 2010-September 2013
Databases Published Materials
September November Increase [%]
2013 2010
[Absolute [Absolute
values] values]
ScienceDirect 11707 8476 38,12
IEEE Xplore Digital Library 13133 6436 104,06
ACM Digital Library 6387 4374 46,02
Table 2. Main topics
Science Direct IEEE ACM
TOTAL No. of articles 11707 13133 6387
decision-making 10964 3446 2821
decision support systems 2935 11832 3825
expert systems 2419 883 1257
management systems 2195 377 427
health care 1533 409 453
supply chain 885 200 332
group decision support systems 296 586 278
data warehouse 220 224 309
business intelligence 144 102 185
intelligent decision support systems 181 54 139
Table 3. The publications which include the highest number of DSS
materials
ScienceDirect
Journal/Book title No. No.
2010 2013
Expert Systems 294 466
with Applications
European Journal 353 386
of Operational
Research
Decision Support 302 351
Systems
Computers & 106 142
Industrial
Engineering
International 119 142
Journal of
Production
Economics
Information & 132 140
Management
Fuzzy Sets and 132 135
Systems
Agricultural 115 134
Systems
Journal of -- 126
Environmental
Management
Environmental -- 105
Modelling &
Software
Social Science & 85 --
Medicine
Omega 82 --
IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Journal/Book title No. No.
2010 2013
IEEE Transactions 61 89
on Systems, Man and
Cybernetics
International Conference -- 87
on Computer Distributed
Control and Intelligent
Environmental
Monitoring (CDCIEM),
2011
19th International -- 82
Conference on Microwave
Radar and Wireless
Communications
(MIKON), 2012
World Congress on -- 81
Information and
Communication
Technologies (WICT),
2012
International Conference -- 76
on Communications,
Devices and Intelligent
Systems (CODIS), 2012
IEEE Transactions on 52 67
Information Technology
in Biomedicine
Proceedings of the 48 54
23rd Annual Hawaii
International Conference
on System Sciences, 1990
Proceedings of the 49 54
Twenty-Fourth Annual
Hawaii International
Conference on System
Sciences, 1991
2nd International -- 54
Conference on
Consumer Electronics,
Communications and
Networks (CECNet), 2012
IEEE Transactions 42 53
on Systems, Man and
Cybernetics, Part A:
Systems and Humans
HICSS-32. Proceedings of 47 --
the 32nd Annual Hawaii
International Conference
on System Sciences, 1999
Vol. III: Decision 45 48
Support and Knowledge
Based Systems Track,
Proceedings of the
22nd Annual Hawaii
International Conference
on System Sciences, 1989
IEEE Transactions on 39 45
Systems, Man, and
Cybernetics, Part C:
Applications and Reviews
IEEE International 38 --
Conference on Systems,
Man, and Cybernetics,
1997. 'Computational
Cybernetics and
Simulation, 1997
Vol.III. Decision 37 --
Support and Knowledge
Based Systems Track,
Proceedings of the
21st Annual Hawaii
International Conference
on System Sciences, 1988
ACM Digital Library
Journal/Book title No. No.
2010 2013
Decision Support 593 978
Systems
Expert Systems 140 406
with Applications:
An International
Journal
Information and 97 117
Management
Interfaces 70 111
Environmental -- 67
Modelling &
Software
MIS Quarterly -- 63
Knowledge-Based -- 92
Systems
Computers -- 89
and Industrial
Engineering
Computers and 36 89
Electronics in
Agriculture
Journal of Medical 29 84
Systems
ACM SIGMIS 36 52
Database
Computers and 28 41
Operations
Research
Proceedings of 26 26
the 28th Hawaii
International
Conference on
System Sciences
Management 22 28
Science --
Fig. 1. Numbers of DSS materials in ScienceDirect, IEEE and ACM
on the 12th of November 2010 and the 1st of September 2013
DSS published materials
12-Nov-10 1-Sep-13
ScienceDirect 8476 11707
IEEE Xplore Digital
Library 6436 13133
ACM Digital Library 4374 6387
Note: Table made from bar graph.
Fig. 2. Evolution, per decade, of numbers
of DSS materials indexed in ScienceDirect
Nov. 2010 Sept. 2013
until 1970 41 36
1971-1980 274 276
1981-1990 998 1019
1991-2000 2292 2342
2001-2010 4871 4934
Note: Table made from line graph.
Fig. 3. Evolution, per decade, of numbers of DSS
materials indexed in IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Nov. 2010 Sept. 2013
until 1970 7 27
1971-1980 18 38
1981-1990 454 594
1991-2000 1864 2559
2001-2010 4093 6495
Note: Table made from line graph.
Fig. 4. Evolution, per decade, of numbers of DSS
materials indexed in ACM Digital Library
Nov. 2010 Sept. 2013
until 1970 3 3
1971-1980 48 57
1981-1990 417 479
1991-2000 1149 1257
2001-2010 2741 3324
Note: Table made from line graph.
