The Bibliographic Comparison of Information Management and Knowledge Management fields through their Scientific outputs; With the Emphasis on the share of Information Science in Each of these Fields

The evolution of cognition a field starts with concentration on concepts, words and terms of that field. In information science field, distinction and similarity between information and knowledge has involved discussions, part of which has been transferred to information management and knowledge management fields. Therefore, the current research has been carried out with the purpose of comparing scientific products of information management and knowledge management fields in WOS and determining the share of library and information science in any of these fields and the scientific products of Iran has been specially studied. This research is conducted applying scientometric method and the population of the research consists of 1457 documents of information management field, 5993 documents of information management field, and 183 documents belonging to both information management and knowledge management fields indexed in WoS. Results of these data analysis shows that although knowledge management field is much younger than information management field, after 15 years from the emergence of this field, the number of documents belonging to this field has taken precedence over documents belonging to information management one, to the extent that in the last research conducted in this regard (2012), the number published documents of knowledge management field is two times more than those of information management one. Based on Web of Science Category Terms in information management field, library and information science has ranked first, while in knowledge management field, library and information science has ranked second. In other words, journals in library and information science field more than journals in other fields have published information management documents, while journals of management field more than other types of journals in other field have published knowledge management documents. Investigating authors with the most number of publications in any of the fields under study shows that these authors consider information management and knowledge management fields as two completely distinct fields. Subject analysis of Iran’s documents and also affiliation of highly productive Iranian authors in these fields show that the status of Iran is in line with the universal status of the field, and Iranian librarians do not have a significant role in knowledge management. A noteworthy finding of this research is that information management and knowledge management fields and especially the latter one are not exclusively controlled by librarians, but if librarians and information specialists want to play a key role in knowledge management phenomenon, they have to get acquainted with the various viewpoints and attitudes of other players of the field