The intellectual structure and interdisciplinary breadth of Knowledge Management: A bibliometric study of its early stage of development

This study explores the intellectual structure and interdisciplinary breadth of Knowledge Management in its early stage of development. Intellectual structure is established by a principal component analysis applied to an author co-citation frequency matrix. The author co-citation frequencies were derived from the 1994-1998 academic literature and captured by the single search phrase of "Knowledge Management." Four factors were labeled Knowledge Management, Organizational Learning, Knowledge-based Theories, and The Role of Tacit Knowledge in Organizations. The interdisciplinary breadth surrounding Knowledge Management mainly occurs in the discipline of management. Empirical evidence suggests that the discipline of Computer Science is not a key contributor as originally hypothesized.