One Hundred Volumes of Neutrosophic Sets and Systems: a Bibliometric Retrospective and a Neutrosophic Framework for Dispersed Citation Evidence (2013–2026)

Abstract

Neutrosophic Sets and Systems (NSS) reaches its one-hundredth volume in 2026, 
thirteen years after its foundation by Smarandache in 2013. No systematic bibliometric retrospective 
of the journal has been published. This paper documents the complete editorial trajectory of NSS and 
introduces a neutrosophic framework for a problem that the journal exhibits in an acute form: its 
articles exist in OpenAlex dispersed across repositories and frequently duplicated with divergent 
citation counts, so that the citation count of an NSS article is not a crisp quantity but an indeterminate 
one. We compiled a reproducible corpus of 2,895 articles across 100 volumes (2013–2026) by 
combining OAI-PMH harvesting, archive crawling and article-level metadata retrieval, and 
disambiguated 5,570 raw signatures into 4,570 unique authors by union-find. The corpus shows an 
extraordinary editorial expansion — from 10 articles in 2013 to 1,023 in 2025 — and a methodological 
profile that differs markedly from that of the applied journal of the ecosystem: multi-criteria decision
making methods appear in only 10.7% of NSS articles, against more than 40% in Neutrosophic 
Computing and Machine Learning. We extend five classical bibliometric indicators into single-valued 
neutrosophic triples and add a sixth extension, specific to this corpus, in which the indeterminacy of 
a citation count is computed from the dispersion among duplicate records of the same article. Beyond 
documentation, the study is designed as an editorial instrument: its explicit objectives include 
informing the indexing strategy of NSS, identifying the structural weaknesses that an external review 
would surface, and returning to the neutrosophic community a reproducible empirical baseline about 
itself. 

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22188553