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Major trends in knowledge management research: a bibliometric study

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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.

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Notes

  1. In this section of the paper (Sect. 3.1) years 2013/14 are removed in figures because it is possible that not these years' works were located (because of time lag which is a common problem of all indexes and databases). However, the full dataset is used for calculations because the error is likely to be randomly/evenly distributed. Thus the full sample of 3198 articles been used for all non-longitudinal types of statistical analyses.

  2. The total number of words was 3645 because some of the keywords consist of multiple words.

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Acknowledgments

Authors would like to express their special thanks to anonymous reviewers that really enriched this research with their valuable comments by three rounds of review.

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    Authors and Affiliations

    1. Department of Management, Malek Ashtar University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

      Peyman Akhavan

    2. Department of Engineering Design and Manufacture, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

      Nader Ale Ebrahim

    3. Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

      Mahdieh A. Fetrati

    4. Department of Management and International Business, Merrick School of Business, University of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, 21201, USA

      Amir Pezeshkan

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    1. Peyman Akhavan
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    2. Nader Ale Ebrahim
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    3. Mahdieh A. Fetrati
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    4. Amir Pezeshkan
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    Corresponding author

    Correspondence to Peyman Akhavan.

    Additional information

    Nader Ale Ebrahim, Mahdieh A. Fetrati and Amir Pezeshkan have contributed equally to this work.

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    Akhavan, P., Ebrahim, N.A., Fetrati, M.A. et al. Major trends in knowledge management research: a bibliometric study. Scientometrics 107, 1249–1264 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1938-x

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