Abstract:

Who is the best connected researcher in the knowledge management area? This study uses social network analysis to address this question. Specifically, 1831 papers published in six top knowledge management research journals from 2000 to 2010 which can be available to access in Proquest database are analyzed. Firstly, by analyzing the degree distribution of the network, we find there exist a few researchers who have quite a large cooperation network, and in contrast a large sum of common researchers who have just a few cooperators. Next, we respectively identify three kinds of 20 authors who have the most connections with others according to degree centrality, who are in the core positions according to closeness centrality and who play the “bridge” roles in the network according to betweenness centrality separately. Finally, two biggest connected sub-graphs, the 57-Actors Graph and the 39-Actors Graph are extracted and discussed respectively, where exist two influential researchers, namely Bontis, N. and Guthrie, J..

Key words: Knowledge management, Co-authorship network, Social network analysis, Academic groups, Scholarly impact