Spatial Decision Support Systems: Three decades on

Abstract

This paper uses a bibliometric approach to examine the growth of and changes in the Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSS) field over the past three decades. Bibliographic databases such as Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus provide valuable information on academic disciplines as they contain both the articles published and the articles cited. The articles published, and the disciplinary categorization of where they are published, are indicative of the changing disciplinary balance in SDSS, while the citation links of these papers illustrate the intellectual structure of the field. The analysis shows that despite conceptual links rooted in DSS, the field of SDSS developed largely independently from DSS, with little interaction between both. This is surprising, given the growing importance of spatial applications in DSS and an overlapping interest in business analytics and big data space-time analytics. The paper argues for greater interest in SDSS developments in the DSS field, including emergency response SDSS and public participation SDSS, as two forms of SDSS which extend DSS.