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Major trends in knowledge management research: a bibliometric study
Scientometrics (2016)
  • Peyman Akhavan, Department of Management, Malek Ashtar University of Technology Tehran, Iran
  • Nader Ale Ebrahim, Research Support Unit, Centre for Research Services, IPPP, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • Mahdieh A. Fetrati, Aalborg University Aalborg, Denmark
  • Amir Pezeshkan, Department of Management and International Business Merrick School of Business University of Baltimore Baltimore, MD 21201
Abstract
This study provides an overview of the knowledge management literature from 1980 through 2014. We employ bibliometric and text mining analyses on a sample of 500 most cited articles to examine the impact of factors such as number of authors, references, pages, and keywords on the number of citations that they received. We also investigate major trends in knowledge management literature including the contribution of different countries, variations across publication years, and identifying active research areas and major journal outlets. Our study serves as a resource for future studies by shedding light on how trends in knowledge management research have evolved over time and demonstrating the characteristics of the most cited articles in this literature. Specifically, our results reveal that the most cited articles are from United States and United Kingdom. The most prolific year in terms of the number of published articles is 2009 and in terms of the number of citations is 2012. We also found a positive relationship between the number of publications’ keywords, references, and pages and the number of citations that they have received. Finally, the Journal of Knowledge Management has the largest share in publishing the most cited articles in this field.
Keywords
  • Bibliometric,
  • Citation analysis,
  • Knowledge management,
  • Research productivity
Publication Date
June 1, 2016
DOI
10.1007/s11192-016-1938-x
Citation Information
Peyman Akhavan, Nader Ale Ebrahim, Mahdieh A. Fetrati and Amir Pezeshkan. "Major trends in knowledge management research: a bibliometric study" Scientometrics Vol. 107 Iss. 3 (2016) p. 1249 - 1264 ISSN: 0138-9130
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/aleebrahim/154/
Creative Commons license
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY-NC-SA International License.