Discovering Knowledge Landscapes: An Epistemic Analysis of Business and Management Field in Malaysia

摘要

Identification of topics that are in trend is of immense assistance to industry and governmental institutions when allotting research resources. For researchers these provide a mechanism to understand the structure and dynamics of knowledge domains. Most of the earlier studies to understand knowledge landscapes have been fragmented, concentrating mainly on co-word analyses. In this study we carry out three-dimensional epistemic analyses involving frequency analysis, social network analysis and Kleinberg Burst analysis to get a more diverse and richer picture of knowledge landscape in Business and Management field in Malaysia. We harvested all 209 papers appearing from 1980 to 2010 in SSCI database Web of Science in Business and Management field with at least one of the authors on each paper having a Malaysian address. Our study found that ‘Malaysia’ has been a hot topic of research for most Malaysian researchers. Knowledge landscape showing interlink between research topics was visualized using Harel- Koren Fast Multiscale spring algorithm. Management topics such as ‘TQM’ and ‘Quality Management’ had increased interest from researchers between 2007 and 2008, which is in sync with Malaysian government's increased thrust during this period to promote SMEs under the Nineth Malaysia Plan (9MP).