Purpose This study, using a new method called Referenced Publication Years Spectroscopy (RPYS), aims to examine the most important historic works written in the area of knowledge management (KM). Design/methodology/approach Preliminary data of this study have been extracted from Web of Science through scientometric methods. The references used in all the papers in the core journals in this field since 1980 to the end of 2014 were studied. Findings The distribution of resources in the area of KM based on the publication year indicates that this field of study, during time intervals 1900 to 1980, has seen eight major mutations. A considerable influence of such fields as economics, business, social networks analysis, organizational learning and economic sociology on the realm of KM is evident. The association of Polanyi with the mutations of 1958, 1962 and 1967 suggests his obvious influence on the evolution of KM. The ratio of articles to books among the whole documents detected by RPYS was 2-13 which could direct us to the point that the channel for information transformation in KM is more focused on books than on articles. Originality/value None of the few studies done by scientometric methods in the realm of KM has been seen through the issue of the historical origins of this area. This piece of research, using a new scientometric method, can be considered the first study in which the origins of KM over time have been studied.

The purpose of this research is to map and analyse the conceptual and thematic structure of library and information science (LIS) research from the perspective of the co-word analysis. The bibliographical records consist of all the research papers published in the LIS core journals between 1990 and 2016 and indexed in Web of Science. ‘CiteSpace’ was used to visualise the co-word network of LIS studies. The frequency of co-occurrence and centrality scores in the overall structure of the field showed that the word ‘Science’ is the most significant and pivotal keyword among the nodes in the co-word network of LIS literature, and in this respect, the word ‘Library’ is in the second place. However, the results of the social network analysis uncovered that in spite of the high frequency of the word ‘library’, the pivotal role of the term has been exposed to decline over the time. The results of the analysis of co-word clusters showed that ‘information seeking and retrieval’ is the most important research focus in the intellectual structure of LIS literature during 1990–2016. Also, analysis of the hot spots of the LIS research based on Kleinberg algorithm indicated that the words ‘Internet’ and ‘World Wide Web’ have attracted the most attention by LIS scholars during the years under study.

This research concerns determining authors’ scientific influence in library and information science research and their impact on the intellectual structure of the discipline by means of integrative indicators of the Scholarly Capital Model and co-authorship patterns. Research records comprised articles published from 1945 to 2016 in library and information science core journals and indexed in Web of Science. CiteSpace (software for visualization of scientific patterns and trends) was employed to map the intellectual structure of library and information science research based on co-authorship patterns. The results showed that the top 10 authors of library and information science research with the highest scores in terms of influence indicators (except for one person) were mostly concerned with the field of scientometrics which can be considered as the special impact of scientometric authors on the intellectual structure of library and information science research especially in recent years. Based on the results of the research, integrative use of scientometric indicators for measuring authors’ level of scholarly influence may grant a more precise perspective for decision makers in the field of library and information science.