Decision support systems research: current state and trends

This study investigates the changing intellectual structure of the decision support system (DSS) field by means of an empirical assessment of the DSS literature over two successive time periods, 1971-1990 and 1991-1995. A multivariate data analysis tool, cluster analysis, is applied to an author cocitation frequency matrix derived from a large database file of comprehensive DSS literature over the two consecutive periods. The study concludes that the core areas of DSS research have shifted to group decision support systems, model management, and design and implementation, while the study of foundations and individual differences has faded away. Moreover, DSS researchers have diversified their reference disciplines in an effort to improve their research. Influence of organization science has been diminished, while cognitive science and psychology have emerged as the most influential contributing disciplines. analysis systems) to ascertain the underlying structure of DSS research subspecialties. An important step in ACA is to select authors who can unobtrusively and unbiasedly represent the DSS area. To achieve this objective, we have built our own citation file and cocitation generation system using a personal computer database management system (Fox-base program). The cocitation rate of 25 with himself/herself is the criterion we used for this longitudinal study. Several experimentations with the sensitivity of changing the cocitation threshold on the final outcomes (number of meaningful factors to accurately represent DSS research subspecialties) did not yield different outcomes. Using the cocitation rate of 25 with himself/ herself over the period 1991 to 1995, the final set of 106 authors was selected for further analysis (see, Table I). The raw cocitation matrix is analyzed by the cluster analysis program of SAS (statistical analysis systems) to ascertain the underlying structure of DSS research subspecialties.