The Intellectual Structure of Knowledge in the Field of Medical Knowledge Management: A Co-Word Analysis

 Despite the importance of knowledge management in healthcare, this sector is widely viewed within the literature, as accepting the concept last. There is not enough information on the topical content of the field of medical knowledge management. Therefore, this study, using scientometrics approaches, attempted to assist the understanding of knowledge trends, identifying core topics, and revealing the intellectual structure of knowledge in this field.

 This was a descriptive, scientometric research, using co-word analysis and hierarchical clustering. The research materials consisted of 868 documents in the PubMed, for the period 1980-2017, that included the term “Knowledge Management” in the title and in the abstract fields. In addition, 200 Persian articles related to the topic, which were covered in Persian databases such as Magiran, Noormagz, the Scientific Information Database (SID) and the Persian Science Citation Index (PSCI) were included.

 There was a positive growth in both sets of documents with a ratio of 2.98 for English and 2.31 for Persian articles. The keywords of English and Persian papers were clustered in 14 and 10 thematic clusters, respectively. To identify similarities between the two groups of documents, clustering results were compared visually. Only 13 common keywords were presented in the thematic clusters of Persian and English documents, and these were scattered across different clusters.

 Identifying and clustering core keywords lead to the conclusion that knowledge management in the field of medicine is mostly service-oriented.