Bibliometric and thematic analysis characterises sustainability oriented multi criteria decision making research in selected web of science categories

Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) enables to resolve sustainability-related problems where different alternatives need to be assessed in view of conflicting criteria. This paper identifies the bibliometric and thematic structure of sustainability-oriented MCDM research based on the corpus of 3001 articles and reviews obtained through the Web of Science Core Collection during the period 2015–2025 in six purposefully chosen subject categories. The corpus received 101,854 Web of Science citations and increased from 50 articles in 2015 to 471 in 2025, that is, at a compound annual growth rate of about 25%. The main contributors of the corpus included China, Iran, Turkey, and India (altogether producing 62.2% of the corpus), while the most common methods were AHP and TOPSIS. Four thematic clusters were revealed: spatial decision-making and energy siting; sustainability assessment and systems optimization; methods selection and management applications; and climate risks and vulnerabilities. Environmental and operational keywords prevailed in the lists of the most common keywords; there was no explicitly social keyword in those lists, suggesting the relatively low presence of the social dimension in the dominant vocabulary rather than its actual absence from the field. The main contribution of this study does not consist in completeness but in critical and transparent demarcation of the bibliometric corpus: the boundaries of the search strategy are provided explicitly, and the distinction is made consistently between the bibliometric evidence and thematic interpretation throughout the paper.