Leveraging Group Decision Aiding with Decision Conferencing: A Systematic Review and a Roadmap for Future Research

Framed within facilitated modelling approaches and grounded on multi-criteria decision aiding concepts, Decision Conferencing (DCing) combines group facilitation, preference modelling and decision analytical software to help groups tackle problems characterized by high complexity, uncertainty, and diverse, conflicting perspectives. Despite its widespread application over the past decades, scholarly knowledge on DCing remains under-systematized and poorly explored. This study addresses this gap through a systematic literature review (SLR) and selected bibliometric analyses of DCing literature, and by identifying major challenges and promising research directions to advance DCing practice. The SLR adhered to the PRISMA guidelines, with structured searches applied to Web of Science, Scopus, EBSCO, ScienceDirect and Google Scholar. Seventy-one studies met the pre-defined criteria and were categorised by year, publication source, country, and type of DCing study. Information on analytical methods/frameworks/tools, software used, and evidence of effectiveness was extracted from DCing case studies. Selected bibliometric analyses included co-authorship and keyword co-occurrence network maps and were conducted to gain further insights into the DCing scientific landscape. Results show that DCing has been applied in multiple contexts and that there is diversity in facilitation practices and methods used; few studies have formally evaluated DCing effectiveness or reported its use in virtual settings. Based on the review findings and on literature from adjacent areas, we propose a roadmap for advancing DCing practice, highlighting the need for research on DCing effectiveness, for comparative studies on methods/software, for investigating biases in DCing settings, for developing empirical research on virtual DCing, and for sharing of best facilitation practices.