Abstract:

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is one of the most widely applied multi-criteria decision-making methods and has been extensively used across numerous scientific disciplines since its introduction in 1980. The objective of this study is to examine the evolution, dissemination, and thematic development of AHP research through a large-scale bibliometric analysis. The study is based on a dataset of 50000 journal articles published between 1980 and 2026 and extracted from the Lens.org database. Bibliometric techniques implemented in the R environment were used to analyze publication trends, geographical distribution, publication sources, research fields, and author-defined keywords. Thematic developments were investigated using alluvial diagrams based on Fields of Study and keyword metadata. The results reveal a continuous and accelerating growth of AHP-related research, with publication output increasing from 179 papers in the 1980s to more than 23000 papers in the still incomplete decade of the 2020s. The findings demonstrate the highly interdisciplinary character of AHP, which is currently applied across thousands of research fields and increasingly integrated with sustainability assessment, GIS technologies, fuzzy approaches, risk analysis, and artificial intelligence-related methods.