Date of Award

3-2-2006

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Department of Systems Engineering and Management

First Advisor

Summer E. Bartczak, PhD

Abstract

Knowledge management (KM) has been receiving ever increasing attention from researchers and practitioners, especially over the last 5 years. Consequently, some researchers and practitioners now believe that KM should be its own discipline and have established KM-specific journals in an effort to further this idea. Many of these journal founders believe that KM has emerged as a mixture of many disciplines and have written the goal of being interdisciplinary into their charters. This research reviews the KM literature published in KM-specific journals from 2000 to 2005. Specifically, using a content analysis methodology, this research reviews and analyzes the body of KM literature in KM-specific journals to determine what the body of literature "looks like." The results of this analysis also are used to compare the body of literature for KM-specific journals to that of the leading information systems (IS) journals for the same time period. Lastly, this approach is used to ascertain whether KM-specific journals are meeting their interdisciplinary goal. The results from this research indicate that, although the coverage of KM focus topics within KM-specific journals is fairly evenly distributed, the KM focus topic of knowledge transfer has been receiving the greatest amount of attention by researchers and practitioners contributing to these journals. Additionally, the comparison of the two bodies of literature (KM and IS) shows that they are similar in their coverage of the KM focus topics spectrum. Lastly, the significant number of disciplines found contributing to KM-specific journals indicates that these journals are, indeed, interdisciplinary.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-GIR-ENV-06M-06

DTIC Accession Number

ADA446224

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