The Delphi technique in forecasting– A 42-year bibliographic analysis (1975–2017)

Since the infancy of the Delphi Technique for collecting and aggregating expert insight, this methodological tool has been discussed, adapted and applied in over 2,600 published scholarly papers to date. This paper mines the major citation indexing services to analyze five dimensions of these data: primary contribution (methodological or applied), field and subfield, length (in pages), year, and journal/conference. Interpreted visual analytics of these five dimensions (both individually and in combination) provide researchers, practitioners and editors with clear insights about whether the Delphi technique is still as prominently used, discussed, and written about in the academic literature as it was twenty years ago and the related trends that might inform predictions of its future use. Among these insights, a simple time series of frequencies of Delphi publications by year immediately shows that academic acceptance of Delphi as a research tool is not only well established, but it has been growing in popularity and range of research domains for two decades predicting unprecedented levels of use in the years to come.