date: 2015-02-18 15:46:54 -0500

It is nice to have a general lay of the land when doing literature searches. To help with this, what follows is a basic overview of the knowledge management literature. This is a non-robust (based on a simple search using the keywords “knowledge management” in Web of Science) overview, and covers only a five year publication window (2010-2014). See last year's post on this topic for a basic sketch of the retrieval process and the code used for the basic analysis.

Sample size is 1,862 records.

Here are the top 20 most frequent words that appear in the article titles. Note that neither the terms knowledge nor management appear in all the article titles (otherwise Freq would equal the sample size of 1,862). Also note that less than half might be helpful either as key terms in database searches or in helping build an intuition about the field. This is because most of the terms are generically related to words commonly found in research studies: e.g., model, research, development, analysis, study, etc. Those terms may be helpful in narrowing down empirical search, however.

There are 460 unique journal titles in the sample (77 more titles than appeared last year). Last year, two journal titles accounted for over 26% of the coverage, but this year the coverage is a bit more diffuse. Here are the journal titles that published at least 1% of the material on knowledge management:

Based on the database search, in the last five years 4,984 authors have published 1,862 papers related to knowledge management. This represents a mean of 2.7 authors per paper and a median of 2.0 authors per paper. Most papers have been authored by four or fewer authors:

• 337 papers have been authored by one person
• 598 papers have been authored by two people
• 563 papers have been authored by three people
• 241 papers have been authored by four people

The most prolific authors in this sample (arbitrarily set to those authors that have published more than 5 articles on knowledge management) follow. Citation counts are limited to the sample and are not total citation counts for all articles or works the author has published:

The ten most cited authors in the sample. Interestingly, this list hardly agrees with last year's list, which means the shift in publication time frame had a substantial effect.

Based on the same search, there is a difference in the publication patterns between last year's list and this year's list. This likely reflects differences in the Web of Science database between last year and this year (these kinds of changes really screw with the validity of bibliometric research, btw).

• 2010: 375 articles
• 2011: 409 articles
• 2012: 384 articles
• 2013: 350 articles
• 2014: 344 articles

Unlike last year, I'm only including one word cloud in this post. The frequency list at the top of this post is much more revealing, but this word cloud is based on a minimum of 15 words.

Citations by year. The citation counts are lower than last year's, which is to be expected. The same expected pattern from last year holds true for this year.

Also as expected, there are fewer higher impact articles and lots of lower impact articles, as measured by citation counts.

Code and data collection process used here is the same as last year's. See that post.

• categories:
  • bibliometrics
  • knowledge management
  • lis658