Pre-specified Protocol: Bibliometric Science Mapping of Fuzzy Neural Networks (2020-2026)
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: This deposit is the pre-specified protocol for a bibliometric science mapping of Fuzzy Neural Networks (FNN) and neuro-fuzzy architectures published between 2020 and 2026. It records the study design, the corpus construction procedure, and the analysis plan before any results are generated, so that a reader can check which parts of the analysis were fixed in advance and which were not. The corpus comprises 19,290 Scopus records retrieved on 2026-09-06 through an institutional subscription, using a locked query library of three term blocks (43 exact phrases plus the acronym ANFIS) over TITLE-ABS-KEY with the window PUBYEAR 2020-2026. Collection was manual, one export per publication year, with Excel truncation disabled and no language or document-type filter. The seven files show zero delta against the screen counts and zero duplicate EIDs, and the SHA-256 of each is recorded in the deposited export log. The single-database design is justified by measurement rather than by convenience. Web of Science Core Collection was queried with the identical library, window, and equivalent field scope before it was ruled out: it returned 9,443 records against the Scopus union of 19,290, covering 49% of the corpus, with the gap concentrated in conference literature and regional journals. Because co-citation and bibliographic coupling require internally consistent reference formatting, Scopus is the sole source of records. OpenAlex is used only for cross-verification of coverage (93.51% by DOI) and for recovery of missing first-author country attribution; no record enters the corpus from OpenAlex. The analysis plan is pre-specified in full: descriptive mapping, intellectual structure via co-citation and bibliographic coupling, conceptual structure via keyword co-occurrence and thematic evolution, social structure via co-authorship networks, and a pre-declared test of whether the field is dominated by applied ANFIS work rather than methodological contributions. Inclusion thresholds, normalization, clustering, seed handling, the three-way treatment of citation counts, and the sensitivity analyses that recompute every network at adjacent thresholds are all fixed here in advance, as are the known limitations and the items that are explicitly not pre-specified. No bibliometric analysis had been executed at the time of this deposit. Corpus construction is complete and verified; the analysis has not been run. Every corpus figure stated in the protocol is verified against artifacts on disk and traceable to a dated provenance report included in this package. The bibliographic records themselves are not redistributed here, as they are subject to Elsevier's terms of use. The deposit contains the protocol, the locked query library, the provenance and audit reports, the Python and R environment locks, and the corpus construction and audit scripts. The four core provenance reports, the export log, the corpus audit, the R ingestion log, and the OpenAlex verification, are deposited in both Portuguese and English, as .md and .en.md, with the Portuguese file as the record of authority in each pair. The query, the counts, and the file checksums are sufficient to reproduce the corpus for anyone with Scopus access. See LICENSE_NOTE.md for the licensing of each component. Version 1.9 corrects the reflexivity statement in section 3 and records a refinement of the thematic-boundary criterion. Versions 1.6 to 1.8 stated that the second author does not publish in the field under study; checking author names against the corpus showed three co-authored records from 2022, so the claim is replaced by the measured productivity and citation positions of all three authors. The boundary rule of section 11.3 was refined after the annual dissimilarity series was computed, by adding a local-maximum requirement to a rule that had used magnitude alone; the sequence is recorded because the refinement followed inspection of the data, and it changed no outcome. No corpus figure, inclusion criterion, or analysis decision differs from version 1.8. Versions 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8 remain accessible under their own DOIs.
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7212520757
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