Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Knowledge ...

Pavel Bogolyubov
Knowledge Management – PKM: Zhang (2009) refers to W2.0 as <strong>of</strong>fering an opportunity for
organizations to tap into personal knowledge (i.e., to facilitate its conversion), similar to Razmerita,
Kirchner et al. (2009) who highlight a number <strong>of</strong> ways how W2.0 can be used to enhance PKM
through making it more dynamic and increase <strong>the</strong> utilization <strong>of</strong> its tacit component.
Finally, ano<strong>the</strong>r group <strong>of</strong> articles is dedicated to particular projects and applications related to
collaboration and knowledge sharing: innovation management (Ribiere and Tuggle 2010), pan-
<strong>European</strong> collaborative projects (Siakas, Georgiadou et al. 2010, which suggests that W2.0 can be an
enabler for cross-cultural collaboration), healthcare, ERP and military (Aherne and Pereira 2008; Wu
and Cao 2009 and Mittu, Guleyupoglu et al. 2008, respectively), e-learning (Kane, Robinson-Combre
et al. 2010), <strong>the</strong> concept <strong>of</strong> open knowledge (García-Peñalvo, Figuerola et al. 2010; Llorens, Bayona
et al. 2010) and data mining (Wang and Wang 2008).
As a whole, <strong>the</strong>se papers appear to suggest that W2.0 can facilitate knowledge creation, conversion
and sharing processes as well as collaboration in organizations via a variety <strong>of</strong> relatively new, more
social approaches, which again, signifies a departure from KM being merely an incarnation <strong>of</strong> data
management in <strong>the</strong> direction <strong>of</strong> tapping into <strong>the</strong> tacit and <strong>the</strong> contextual.
The bibliometrical analysis – an attempt to measure <strong>the</strong> level <strong>of</strong> activity and localize it – shows that on
average, <strong>the</strong>re are 1.26 papers per active institution and 24.05 per country published , with 2.29 and
44.38 publishing authors (“Hits”) respectively. The top institutions are represented in Table 2 (<strong>the</strong>
institutions with 10 hits or above are shown).
Table 2: top institutions and countries by productivity (number <strong>of</strong> active authors)
Answering <strong>the</strong> question about whe<strong>the</strong>r W2.0 is an academic or a practitioner-led topic, <strong>the</strong> results
show that <strong>the</strong> list is dominated by universities in general, but <strong>the</strong>y are in <strong>the</strong> minority in <strong>the</strong> top five,
Micros<strong>of</strong>t and IBM being quite prolific (o<strong>the</strong>r non-academic institutions appearing too, but much fur<strong>the</strong>r
down <strong>the</strong> full list); <strong>the</strong>re are also a number <strong>of</strong> authors without any discernible affiliation (freelance);
ABA Banking Journal, although high on number <strong>of</strong> publications, is <strong>the</strong>re mostly due to a high number
<strong>of</strong> editorials not attracting citations (total NCII <strong>of</strong> 0.2). These findings are interesting in <strong>the</strong> sense that
despite <strong>the</strong> overall American dominance on <strong>the</strong> list, quite a few o<strong>the</strong>r regions (Europe, Asia, Australia)
are represented to a noticeable degree too. The findings are also shown on Fig. 3 using a tag cloud.
The top-twenty “league table” for countries by <strong>the</strong> number <strong>of</strong> hits can be seen in Table 3, and <strong>the</strong>
corresponding tag cloud – on Fig. 4 (USA has had to be removed from <strong>the</strong> picture to enhance o<strong>the</strong>r
countries’ visibility). It is dominated by English-speaking countries, with as much as 53% <strong>of</strong> all
published by American and English institutions, <strong>the</strong> Commonwealth countries represented as well,
which repeats to a high degree <strong>the</strong> findings <strong>of</strong> Serenko and Bontis regarding KM (US and UK totalling
50% and being followed by Australia, Canada and Spain; also similar to <strong>the</strong>ir results, 49% <strong>of</strong> all
papers are sole-authored, which is, according to <strong>the</strong>m, a sign <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> field being relatively young with
little collaborative links established within <strong>the</strong> subject community).
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