Recent multi-criteria group decision making methods focus their analysis on the experts preferences. They do not take into account the reasons why each expert has provided a specific set of preferences. In this paper, a method that introduces novel measures capable of explaining the reasons behind experts decisions is presented. A novel concept, the arguments are presented. They represent the experts have for maintaining a certain position in the debate. Several measures related to the arguments are proposed. These new argumentation measures, along with consensus measures, help us to get a clear idea about how and why a specific resolution has been reached. They help us to determine which is the most influential expert, that is, the expert whose contributions to the debate have inspired the rest. Also, the proposed method allows us to determine which are the arguments that most of the experts have followed. A clear overview about how the debate is evolving in terms of arguments is also provided. The novel presented analysis indicate how the experts change their opinions in every round and what was the reason for it, which changes have occurred between rounds and they also provide global analysis results.

Abstract Thomson Reuters' Web of Science (WoS) is undoubtedly a great tool for scientiometrics purposes. It allows one to retrieve and compute different measures such as the total number of papers that satisfy a particular condition; however, it also is well known that this tool imposes several different restrictions that make obtaining certain results difficult. One of those constraints is that the tool does not offer the total count of documents in a dataset if it is larger than 100,000 items. In this article, we propose and analyze different approaches that involve partitioning the search space (using the Source field) to retrieve item counts for very large datasets from the WoS. The proposed techniques improve previous approaches: They do not need any extra information about the retrieved dataset (thus allowing completely automatic procedures to retrieve the results), they are designed to avoid many of the restrictions imposed by the WoS, and they can be easily applied to almost any query. Finally, a description of WoS Query Partitioner, a freely available and online interactive tool that implements those techniques, is presented.

The aim of this paper is to propose a procedure to estimate missing preference values when dealing with incomplete fuzzy linguistic preference relations assessed using a two-tuple fuzzy linguistic approach. This procedure attempts to estimate the missing information in an individual incomplete fuzzy linguistic preference relation using only the preference values provided by the respective expert. It is guided by the additive consistency property to maintain experts' consistency levels. Additionally, we present a selection process of alternatives in group decision making with incomplete fuzzy linguistic preference relations and analyze the use of our estimation procedure in the decision process. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.