Evidence-based knowledge management: a topic modeling analysis of research on knowledge management and analytics

Abstract

Purpose Organizations widely adopt knowledge management (KM) to develop and promote technologies and improve business effectiveness. Analytics can aid in KM, further augmenting company performance and decision-making. There has been significant research in the domain of analytics in KM in the past decade. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the current body of literature on the adoption of analytics in KM by offering prominent themes and laying out a research path for future research endeavors in the field of KM analytics. Design/methodology/approach A comprehensive analysis was conducted on a collection of 123 articles sourced from the Scopus database. The research has used a Latent Dirichlet Allocation methodology for topic modeling and content analysis to discover prominent themes in the literature. Findings The KM analytics literature is categorized into three clusters of research – KM analytics for optimizing business processes, KM analytics in the industrial context and KM analytics and social media. Originality/value Systematizing the literature on KM and analytics has received very minimal attention. The KM analytics view has been examined using complementary topic modeling techniques, including machine-based algorithms, to enable a more reliable, systematic, thorough and objective mapping of this developing field of research.