Revealing research themes and trends in knowledge management: From 1995 to 2010

Visualizing the entire domain of knowledge and tracking the latest developments of an important discipline are challenging tasks for researchers. This study builds an intellectual structure by examining a total of 10,974 publications in the knowledge management (KM) field from 1995 to 2010. Document co-citation analysis, pathfinder network and strategic diagram techniques are applied to provide a dynamic view of the evolution of knowledge management research trends. This study provides a systematic and objective means in exploring the development of the KM discipline. This paper not only drew its finding from a large data set but also presented a longitudinal analysis of the development of the KM related studies. The results of this study reflect that the coverage of key KM papers has expanded into a broad spectrum of disciplines. A discussion of the future of KM research is also provided.