Scientometrics, Knowledge Management, and Social Network Analysis

What is knowledge management? There are more than 50 definitions of it. This is simply confusing for every executive task with the knowledge management initiative in his/her organization.

In 2001, Michael Earl (Professor of Information Management at London Business School), pointed out the need for models, frameworks, or methodologies that can help corporate executives to evaluate what types of knowledge management initiatives is appropriate for their organization.

Earl differentiated the schools of knowledge management into:

1. Systems. Focus: Technology. The underpinning philosophy is codification of domain specific-knowledge. The engine of this school is a computer system capture, store, organize, and display knowledge derived from expertise and experience. –> Knowledge Repository
2. Cartographic. Focus: Maps. Concerns about mapping the organizational knowledge. This is more of a knowledge directory which tries to record and disclose who in the organization knows what.  The knowledge is as likely to be tacit as explicit.  –> Knowledge Map
3. Engineering. Focus: Processes.  This is a derivation of business process reengineering. The idea driving this school is that peformance of business process can be enhanced by providing operational personnel with knowledge relevant to their task.  –> Knowledge Sharing
4. Commercial. Focus: Income. –> Knowledge exploitation
5. Organizational. Focus: Networks.
6. Spatial. Focus: Space.
7. Strategic. Focus: Mindset.

Source: http://staffweb.ncnu.edu.tw/hyshih/download/KM/Paper/KM%20strategy%20taxonomy.pdf

There are some most commonly used methods to count for an author’s productivity, namely:

1. First author counting: Only the first author receives the credit with a count of 1, other authors do not receive any credit.
2. Total author counting: Each author receive a credit with a count of 1.
3. Fractional counting: Here, if a publication is authored by N number of authors, each author receive credit with a count of 1/N.

Besides these three methods, there are also different methods such as proportional counting, pure geometric count, Noblesse oblige, etc which can be seen here.