Thematic trends of concepts in Knowledge and Information Science based on co-word analysis in Iran

This study aims to identify and compare thematic trends of concepts in Knowledge and Information Science based on the records indexed in the Islamic World Science Citation Database (ISC) during two-time span (2006-2010 and 2011-2015).
This study is a scientometric applied research which uses co-word analysis techniques. The research population consists of all Persian journals in Knowledge and Information Science category indexed by ISC.
Findings: Based on data analysis, the number of keywords in the articles is 8862 keywords, of which 2832 are related to the first five-year period and 6030 keywords in the second five-year period. The application of the Bradford’s Law indicated that in the first period, the core concepts were 25 cases, and in the second period 33 cases. The results of the strategic diagram showed that scientometric clusters have the best position in Iran's Knowledge and Information Science. Furthermore, topics such as user interface, information architecture, search engines, digital library, metadata, information search, information security, knowledge management, ontologies, visualization and social networks are among the emerging concepts in Iran's Knowledge and Information Science.
Regarding the changes in the topics of the second period in comparison to the first period, and with the dimming of concepts such as “journals” and “documents” and the highlighting of keywords such as “information technology” and “websites”, it can be said that in the transition from the first period to the second period, concepts that contain traditional topics of the domain are dimmed and concepts that contain IT topics have been replaced.