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The past decade has seen extensive research on knowledge and knowledge management ([5] Bontis and Serenko, 2009; [28] Marymalavi and Leidner, 2006; [42] Serenko and Bontis, 2009). With the rapid growth of knowledge economy, knowledge management has gradually developed into an independent academic field and a large number of researchers have begun to examine knowledge management. Yet even though knowledge management has established itself as an academic discipline, its establishment is a slow process as researchers in this area prefer to publish their best work in more established journals. Another obstacle to the development of knowledge management lies in the subject's unusually high degree of interaction with other disciplines. This overlapping blurs the boundaries of knowledge management and, as a result, its distinct theoretical model and analytical tools are unjustly attributed to other competing fields. With limited resources contributing to the development of knowledge management, the cross-fertilization of ideas between scholars in knowledge management will be much more difficult to obtain. Consequently, while there is no doubt that there exists an academic field of knowledge management, the question remains somehow unclear on what it is, how good its work is, and what its prospects and needs are for future development.
The objective of this study is to provide knowledge management researchers with a unique map to better understand knowledge management related publications in the last decade and to provide a systematic and objective mapping of different themes and concepts in the development of knowledge management field. This study also attempts to help identify the linkage among different publications and confirm their status and positions in their contribution to the development of knowledge management field. The principal methods used are citation and co-citation analysis, social network analysis, plus a factor analysis which is performed to identify the invisible network of knowledge generation within the knowledge management literature.
Studies of academic literature: citation and co-citation analysis
There are a number of techniques that can be used to study a body of literature. The most frequent is a simple literature review, where a highly subjective approach is used to structure historical work in a given field. Objective and quantitative techniques have recently become popular with more online databases available for use. These techniques adopt author citations, co-citations, and...