Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to map the intellectual structure of conflict management studies and to investigate the key themes, concepts, and their relationships of conflict management literature in the past decade. Design/methodology/approach -Citation and co-citation analysis and social network analysis were used to trace the development path of conflict management research. The data were collected by searching the SSCI databases, based on 556 journal articles which were published between 1997 and 2006, and their cited references were analyzed and profiled. Findings -The paper shows that conflict management literature focuses on three key themes: workplace conflict and conflict management styles, cultural differences in conflict management, and conflict management in practice. In addition, research on group conflict and work performance has gained momentum in recent years. Originality/value -The intellectual structure of conflict management literature has received little attention in spite that a large number of studies have been done on conflict management. This paper will expose researchers to a new way of profiling key themes and their relationships in conflict management area, which will help academia and practitioners understand better contemporary conflict management studies.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to explore the research paradigms of contemporary knowledge management studies in the past decade using citation and co-citation analysis.Design/methodology/approach -Research in any academic area often clusters into informal networks that focus on common questions in common ways, and the accumulated knowledge often flows between members of these networks, revealed in patterns of citations. The research paradigms of a given field can be identified by analyzing corresponding knowledge flows and citation and co-citation process. The methods used in the study include citation analysis, co-citation analysis, and social network analysis.Findings -The paper draws an intellectual map of knowledge flows between knowledge management scholars. Key research themes and concepts as well as their relationships in the field of knowledge management are identified.Research limitations/implications -An in-depth analysis of the relationships between knowledge management research and industrial practices should be conducted in future in order to examine the impact of academic research on knowledge management and the management of knowledge accumulated in the practice.Originality/value -The paper profiles knowledge management studies in the past decade and presents a solid foundation for a better understanding of different research paradigms in the area of knowledge management. It helps identify the invisible network of knowledge management studies that traces the evolution of knowledge management research, which thus provides a new perspective on knowledge management research.

This study explores the research paradigms of contemporary business ethics research in 2001–2008. With citation data from the top two business ethics journals included in the Social Sciences Citation Index, this study conducts citation and co‐citation analysis to identify the most important publications, scholars, and research themes in the business ethics area and then maps the intellectual structure of business ethics studies between 2001 and 2008. The results show that current business ethics studies cluster around four major research themes, including morality and social contract theory, ethical decision making, corporate social responsibility, and stakeholder theory. This study helps profile the invisible network of knowledge production in business ethics and provides important insights on current research paradigms of business ethics studies.

To map the intellectual structure of human resource management studies in the past decade, this study investigated the most important publications and the most influential scholars as well as the correlations among these documents by analyzing 33,132 citations of 1,267 articles published by SSCI journals in human resource management area between 1996 and 2005. This study further mapped the invisible network of knowledge of human resource management using co-citation analysis. Such a mapping can help identify the paradigm shift of human resource management research, and provide a valuable tool for researchers to access the literature in this area. INTRODUCTIONThe past decade has seen active research in human resource management and thus produced an impressive array of literature of human resource management. While research findings in human resource management can be disseminated to scientists and practitioners in the form of journal articles, papers, books, and other documents, scholars are easily confused with the research subjects and their contributions to the development of human resource management when faced with thousands of human resource management publications. Great efforts have been made to explore these issues, yet all the issues are usually discussed solely based on experts' subjective assessment, which often leads to many controversies in the study of human resource management area.To approach these issues in a more objective manner, a generic model of invisible network of knowledge (INK) is proposed in this paper which can be used to map the intellectual structure in the human resource management area. With citation and co-citation analysis this model is able to explore the intellectual structure of any existent field, delineate its knowledge network, and further portrait its knowledge diffusion process. The invisible network of knowledge (INK) model is defined in this paper as a set of interlinked invisible nodes, represented by different publications with their frequency of citations, and the correlations of these publications. Each set of such nodes serves a specific purpose for the study of human resource management or any other field of interest.Following Latour's study (1987), this study uses epistemological scientometrics to portray the invisible network of knowledge in human resource management in order to identify the intellectual architects (who), the contributions of these intellectual architects (what), and the time and place in which they published them (when and where) in human resource management area. The purpose of this study is to map the intellectual structure of human resource management studies for the past decade between 1996 and 2005 and to explore the paradigm shifts of the invisible network of knowledge generation in the field of human resource management (Kuhn, 1962;. The results of this study will also help those who want to independently study the related fields of human resource management.